Hmm. That sounds rather ominous. Relax, it just means I am starting  the day’s blogging while waiting for the bus at school.

Didn’t mean to spook ya.

Did I mention that I whanged my knee into the door while getting into the cab last night? I whanged it alright. Really hard. It hurt like a son of a bitch.I am still not sure how I did it, but getting into an SUV is challenging when you already have one bad knee and it’s dark out.

So when I woke up this morning, it was very sore and stiff. There is no visible damage, but that happens with me sometimes. I get invisible bruising. A bruise I can clearly feel and which is sore to the touch just like a bruise, but totally invisible.

It must be related to the fact that I have the kind of veins that are hard to find when it is needle time. Blood vessels aren’t close to the surface, or somesuch.

I think the bruising is also mostly under the kneecap. I don’t  think it is too serious. It already feels better than it did this morning. I imagine it will be mostly better by the end of the weekend, if not sooner.

It is not like I move a lot on weekends anyhow.

Good news on the finance front. Turns out I only owe Kwantlen $1463. Turns out they got my federal money just fine. It’s the province that’s the problem.The federal gubmint paid Kwantlen their portion (based on my low-income status) way back in September, shortly after the loan was approved.

You would think that would be good enough for the province, but noooooooo.

Still, it’s good that it’s a smaller amount of money than I thought. Exactly how much better is unquantifiable, but one assumes it must be easier to raise less money.

Still dunno how I am going to do it. Working up the nerve to email my siblings, or at least, post about my plight directly on Facebook instead of in this indirect form.

I am having so much trouble concentrating on blogging right now. And I know why, it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I woke up at 8:30 am and could not get back to sleep. Happens every once in a while. Plus, it was cold outside and it’s toasty warm in here, so I have full on Melt going on right now. All I really want to do right now is curl up in bed and go to sleep, but I don’t have a lot of time to blog tonight as we are likely going out to eat.

So blog away I must, witless mind or no. You don’t really love something unless you do it when it’s not easy, and I love blogging. Besides, I would never leave you nice people in the lurch. I know there’s like a half dozen people who read this blog, and some of you might even enjoy iy.

And that really means a lot to me.

Oh, here’s something I forgot to include in yesterday’s entry. When I was on the bus to White Spot, a woman sat behind me and, the minute the bus was in motion, started to swear passionately under her breath.

And I am thinking “Okay, steady on, she might not be crazy. She might have just gone through a genuinely infuriating incident. Like maybe she just got dumped, or she is dealing with some extra heavy office stupidity, or something. ” Meanwhile, the hackles on my neck are rising.

I suppose the neck is the only place we have hackles.

It’s amazing how powerful these instinctual responses can be. Most of the time, we modern humans don’t have a lot of experience of our rawer instincts, like our sense of danger or basic fear. Everything in modern life tends to be nuanced, articulated, attenuated, and the result of many forces interacting within us.

But not this time. My hackles, and the icy fear rising in me, said “Crazy person, beware!”. Even though I am an actual crazy (but medicated) person myself.

I guess even crazy people don’t want to be around crazy people. At the very least, not all of a sudden like that.

It could have also been Tourette’s, which would be tragic, because then that poor woman might have been mutely wishing she could keep her mouth from saying all that crazy shit.

That didn’t occur to me at the time, though. Luckily, White Spot was the next stop, and so I didn’t have to find out how that particular little drama played out.

And I found out my Psych 1100 prof considers herself a radical behaviourist today, which is sad, because she’s so adorkable and I absolutely loathe behaviourism in all its forms.

My theory of behaviourism is that B. F. Skinner had Asperger’s Syndrome. And so do many of his adherents. It would go a long way towards explaining behaviourism’s terror of contemplating mental events, a terror that drives them to pretend that what is actually going on in people’s minds is somehow unknowable.

Bullshit. It might not be quantifiable or provable, but it’s damned well knowable and understandable. That’s why we have empathy, a scientifically verifiable brain function that lets us understand each other by feeling what the other guy feels. We are actually pretty good at understanding one another’s behaviour and emotions most of the time. Most people don’t have to guess why the man whose hair is on fire is screaming.

And then she said she thinks free will is an illusion, and there is so much wrong with that idea that I can’t even. Absolutely nothing we do makes sense without free will. Our entire understanding of the world is predicated on the notion that people choose their actions and can therefore be held accountable for them. We integrate the idea that we have made the right choices into our egos, as well as the bad ones.

What really struck home was when I said that if there is no free will, then I have no choice but to think you are wrong. That works because it makes people realize that no free will means they have no right to be annoyed at you for disagreeing with them.

I am clever like that.

Time to melt! I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got my Final Notice email from Kwantlen today. They want their money. Cannot blame them.

So I called the student loan people to see how that is going. Turns out they haven’t even STARTED processing my disability documentation yet. Apparently, it takes five business days for my documents to make it from their inbox to their computer system. Nobody has even ENTERED my form into the System yet.

That is fucking INSANE! What the fucking is wrong with these people? Why does everything take so long? What possible excuse could there be for data entry to take that long? Hello, just scan the fucking thing.

So the six weeks they are going to take to process my disability documentation hasn’t even STARTED yet. Fuck.

So there goes all hope I had of being able to pay Kwantlen before school ends. That means I am going to have to go to Plan B : borrow the money from someone or somewhere else.

Maybe I could donate blood.

I have no idea from whom  or where I could borrow $2600+ . I already owe Joe $375 for stuff. I would hate to have to go to him for more.

Gah. The music at White Spot sucks today. Just heard someone  just BUTCHER “Life Is A Highway” by Tom Cochrane. It’s like he was determined to hit every note EXCEPT the right one. Lousy phrasing too.

Oh and now someone is taking a shot at Screaming  Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You”.

Back to the topic at hand. I could try to borrow from my siblings, I suppose, but I can’t see that working. We are not that kind of family. And it is not like adking for an Xbox or something. This is a lot of money we are talking about, even if it is just a loan.

So I dunno. Maybe I am fucked, I don’t know. It was fun while it lasted.

Oh, and the roof of my mouth is all tender and sore for some reason, Aaand they just sat a family with a baby next to me.

Geez, life, what did I ever do to you?

I am so tired of tripping over my own clueless self all the time. This all could have been over ages ago if I wasn’t such a dipshit. But no, somehow the Jagoff in me managed to do me a dirty yet again.

I am starting to think that guy doesn’t have my best interests at heart. That he just  gets his kicks from talking me into bad decisions. Then laughs at me behind my back.

But his brand of relaxed cockiness is also my route out of my depression, I think. I think at least some of that can do a lot to keep my self-image upright and afloat in times like this. There is an untapped well of positivity in there somewhere, and it could be my salvation.

(—)

Waiting for the bus now. There is a stop for my beloved 405 only a few doors away from White Spot. Convenient.

(—)

Home now. Took a cab. This happened :

Me : *hands the cabbie a $20 bill* Okay, give me… $12 back. (On a $5.70 fare. )
Cabbie : *pretends to look for change* Oh no, I don’t…. I have no ten…
Me : (instantly suspicious because I know this con) Oh really? You seriously want me to believe you can’t change a twenty?
Cabbie : I gave it to my last customer….
Me : Well, then we have a problem, don’t we?
Cabbie : No, I don’t….
Me : You know there’s no way I am giving you the whole thing, right?
Cabbie : Listen, I don’t have…
Me : Well then, why don’t we just go on over to the 7-11 so you can get change?
Cabbie : Listen, never mind, it’s okay…
Me : Are ya sure?
Cabbie : It’s okay, forget about it.
Me : It’s your call.

So I got out of the cab without paying and I don’t feel bad about it at all. Asshole bet on the wrong fucking pony if he thought I would give him $20 on a cab fare of $5.60. And the idea of going two blocks so he could get change at 7-11 was perfectly reasonable. I would even have paid the extra fare. But no, when he realized I was on to him, he back down.

And instead, I got a free ride home. Them’s the breaks, asshole.

Tonight’s class was fun. Had to do the teacher evaluation first. That’s where the teacher leaves the room and a nice lady gets us to fill out a form rating our prof on various things. This time it was online, with a disposable password. It prompted an inner struggle within me, because I really like my prof, but when you make me do something that looks like a test in a classroom setting, the urge to put down the “right” answer (in other words, be brutally honest) is strong in me.

I managed to mostly restrain it. I don’t want to cause her any problems. I did mention that sometimes she is too lenient with how long she gives people to do things and that means we don’t get through all the material for the day.

But I am only human, and I was under strain.

Otherwise, the class was fun if frustrating. Doing animation via Photoshop suuuuuuuucks. But I plugged away and got it done.

Only to realize that two of the students had ignored the instructions and done everything in a video editing program. and I was like…. that’s an option? and of course, the prof, being the sweetie she is, didn’t object at all.

So I was left thinking “I wish I was that bold. ” But I’m not. It’s not a matter of timidity, though. I feel like if I ignore the teacher’s instructions, I am insulting them. That would be rude.

And I really like this teacher.

On the other hand, part of me is tempted to do the project here are home, make it kick ass in all dimensions, stick it in my Dropbox, and spend the next class blogging and messing around with Adobe products.

Which side will win?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got some stuff for Creative Writing to do tonight, so the earlier I get to Dun Bloggin, the better.

Not that it is particularly hard stuff. I was worried about the 6-10 photos I have to do, but then I reread the assignment description and saw a wonderful,  magical word I had missed before : “abstract”.

What is needed, it turns out, are abstract textures and such to use as backgrounds for a video of one of my poems. No prob! I can find that kind of stuff around the apartment. Or at school.

The poem half of the equation won’t be so simple, though. In fact, that is what I am truly dreading, because get this, I am expected to take my thirty line poem from last week and condense it down to 12-18 lines.

The very thought of it makes me queasy. Condense a poem? Does one condense a child? I say thee nay! I would vastly prefer writing a new poem to butchering an existing one. The things this class puts me through.

I am tempted to just remove a bunch of line breaks and consider it done.

Plus I have to bring some original audio to use as background music for the condensed poem.. No prob. I will either use one of my existing tunes or write something suitably ambient from scratch.

And yes, that was a brag. That was me, bragging. I brag sometimes. It is not a bad thing to have bragged.

Still getting used to that idea.

(—)

Got the itch to start reading up on my Myers-Briggs personality type, INTJ, again, and found this page that goes into far more detail than I have ever seen before.

And as happened when I joined an INTJ forum a long time ago, I get this feeling of recognition of parts of myself alongside equal feelings of revulsion and a kind of gratitude over problems I do not have.

Perhaps I am a queer duck even by INTJ standards.

It’s like the INTJ part of me is The Machine, and everything else is The Mother. I definitely think like an INTJ, but I am too sensitive, pragmatic, and ruthlessly devoted to understanding the full picture to fall into the sorts of Asperger type traps that the sort of person described in sites like that fall into.

For example, I don’t consider social ritual and manners to be useless distractions. I do feel free to pick and choose which ones I consider to be functional and which ones are mere arbitrary rules that serve no purpose, but I am very, very concerned about being a considerate and understanding person who doesn’t hurt people accidentally.

Like I have said before, there are “rules” manners – which fork to use – and those are disposable. Following them is optional. If it helps to have rules to follow, then follow them. But if the rules are only getting in the way, then to hell with them.

It’s only the “consideration manners” – like saying something comforting when someone shares something painful to them – that I consider mandatory. And you can’t define that with any fixed ruleset.

On the other hand, I definitely have a fast, decisive, confident mind. That’s The Machine. And why I would hate for anyone to see me as cold and unfeeling, I can see how I might come across as such in certain situations. Some people will always see the dedicated utilitarian pragmatist as some kind of monster. Like the site says, that’s why so many villains are based on an INTJ like archetype. Some of the other types simply can’t accept that you can be a system creating and logical person who makes decisions based on rational consideration instead of emotion and be anything other than a sociopathic monster.

Essentially, they think you can’t do warm things by cold means.

But you can. I am dedicated to pragmatism and utilitarianism because I am determined to make the world a better place and improve the lot of humanity without becoming distracted by dogma, or bogged down in preconceived notions or habits of thought.

The site also talking about arrogance, and yeah, I will cop to that. I don’t personally consider myself arrogant, just sure of myself, but to a lot of people that’s the same thing. Like the site says, us INTJs radiate an aura of confidence. In the right spheres (usually transpersonal ones), I make up my mind rapidly and state my position with total self-assurance because I know, on some level, what went into the decision, which is basically everything I know about the world.

It’s hard for people to grasp that such a thing is even possible. Fast answers can’t be well considered answers. And in a sense they are right, but not really. The fact is, us INTJ types are constantly optimizing our minds, turning them into lean and mean decision making machines, and that results in a mind which, in the right circumstances, is almost alarmingly swift.

The site says that relationships are the biggest stumbling blocks for INTJs, and I suppose that’s true. I don’t think of myself as someone who has problems with relationships, but I do admit my intellectual standards for companionship are extremely high, and that’s a big stumbling block right from the get-go.

And the thing is, I have no idea what I am actually like in relationships. I think I am a pretty good friend, although I wish I had the resources to be more substantially supportive sometimes. But that’s the only kind of relationship I know, at least as an adult, and even that is not as emotionally close as it could be.

I have no idea whether the Machine would get in the way of a romantic or parental relationship. I know that I don’t have to worry about being capable of projecting warmth, compassion, and understanding. I have lots of that on tap at all times. Thats The Mother in me. I don’t have a problem with showing affection or being supportive.

And yet… and yet….

I can’t help thinking of my own warm and affectionate, yet also somehow emotionally distant, mother.

That’s a mystery I have yet to solve.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is break time in Intro to Journalism, so, time to get my blog on.

Not that I have a lot of time. Its a fifteen minute break, but I had to pee first, and the bathroom near this classroom was out of service, so I had to go all the way across the building and back ti get my business done.

First world problems.

Today has been pleasant enough. Got up at around ten. Did the weekly home I forgot to do last night because I was concentrating on getting the Rough Draft version of my final project for this class done.

That is the thing I posted here last night.

As you can see, for said draft, I had to do some of that awful research stuff.  I have been doing some soul searching about my dislike of research, and the results  aren’t  pretty. I am pretty sure I dislike research because it might disagree with me.

I am very much a writer who writes from the inside out. There are things inside me that I need to express, and for various reasons, I have to do it via writing. That meabs that, by the time I am writing, it is very much an output mode. I am not looking to take in new information, that is the exact opposite of what I am trying to do when I write.

Sure, what I write is informed by what I know. But what I write comes from deep inside. New information has not had the time to make that journey.

But that also means that by the time I write, I have made up my mind. And that is the part I like. Thinking, judging, concluding, and outputting the results of that process. Taking in a ton of new information in order to come up with an answer on a deadline is no fun at all.

And honestly, nobody likes changing their mind. It is just that some of us are willing and able to do it… if we have to.

Now you folks know I think of myself as a rugged intellectual, a true philosopher who stands fearless and naked before the truth, no matter how dark, strange, disturbing, or depressing that truth might be.

Avoiding research in order to avoid having to rethink subjects on which I have already made up my mind is not exactly consistent with that image of myself

(—)

Just got my exam back in Psych 1200. Another 83 percent. How bizarrely consistent.

And awesome, of course. I am rocking an A- so far in this class. Want to bring that up to an A. Maybe the written project will help.

The average was 70.5 percent. So, booya.

(—)

After class now. Waiting inside for the bus. It’s bleeding cold out there. Pondering getting something at the Tim’s here. But what?

Ended up getting two candy cane donuts and a croissant. I am very excited about the croissant. I loooooove croissants. The donuts are more of a curiosity. They appear to be chocolate donuts with crushed candy cane sprinkled on. Not exactly sure that sounds good. But very festive!:-)

(—)

Son of a bitch. Missed my bus by mere seconds. And of course, the battery on this tablet is running out, and I have fifteen minutes to kill, and I have no other ways to entertain myself.

How come this keeps happening to me? I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

I may end up eating that croissant before I get home. I am not going anywhere near the donuts on an empty stomach, but I could probably handle the croissant without too harsh a spike in blood sugar.

The harsh spikes are painful. Especially if I am just sitting or laying there.

I am bored. Let’s talk about terrorism.

We had a very interesting discussion about the Paris attacks in class today. I am starting to wonder if there really is any difference between a crazed shooter like they have in the States and the lunatics who blow themselves up at checkpoints in Afghanistan. In both cases, we have a situation where thousands of people have the exact same beliefs, but only a few of them do the crazy thing.

Maybe the Paris attackers are just as crazy as Ted Kazinsky and the Unabomber.

(—)

Home now. Where was I?

Oh right. Maybe the Paris attackers are just as crazy as Ted Kazinsky and the Unabomber. Maybe by calling them terrorists, we legitimize what they do. Maybe we would be better off treating absolutely all similar acts as the sad, desperate act of a diseased and deluded nutcase who deserves only our pity.

Imagine how demoralizing and demeaning that would be to any terrorist organization or cause. Completely ignore the person’s politics. No manifesto, no political rants, not even whatever they were screaming as they killed people. Ignore all that, and treat every single act as the act of a deranged lunatic with a broken brain.

Try to feel like a big man when that is going to be your legacy.

People don’t want to think of the Paris attackers as insane because we all hate them now and hatred hates nuance and pity. Especially pity. We want these people to be the blackest foulest evil possible so we can hate them and wish the vilest of sufferings and degradations upon them with a clear conscience.

Even though if you asked someone, outside of the news cycle or any specific event, what kind of person could kill a bunch of people they didn’t even know, they would probably say “It would have to be some kind of lunatic. ”

And can we really say to ourselves that there is any definition of sanity that includes the ability to perform such horrendous acts? Can we really believe that the Paris attackers acted with cold-blooded self-interest in mind? What if it was your next door neighbor? Or your brother? Would you be more or less inclined to call it insanity then?

Maybe all these people are crazy, and that’s why they end up doing what thousands of people just like them only talk about.

Maybe we have to rethink a lot of things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As in this :

Today’s been mildly crappy.

For one, all day long it’s been dark, rainy, cold, and miserable. And I had to wait for the bus in it. Twice. When I went out to wait for the bus the first time, it was 3 degrees Celsius, dark as mid-dusk, and raining hard. And I was late. I missed my bus. That’s what I get for trying to push my luck so I wouldn’t have to wait in the rain and cold for too long.

Instead, I ended up waiting for the bus for almost half an hour in that miserable weather. And then, of course, I was late for class, which I hate, because as I have mentioned before, I hate missing stuff.

And then class was over and it was time to come home. This time, I successfully managed to be smart. When I read on the schedule posted at the bus stop that my bus wouldn’t be there for 15 minutes, I went back up the steps and spent ten minutes inside the warm dry confines of Kwantlen.

I realized today that the little bits of exercise I get moving around Kwantlen, including making it up the stairs every day, don’t hurt nearly as much as they used to. So maybe I am finally getting into proper condition. Took longer than I thought, but what the hell. It makes life easier.

As it turned out, my bus was late, so my clever plan was only partially successful. I ended up waiting out there for something like eight minutes anyway. And none too happy about it either. I really need to weatherproof myself ASAP.

In other recent crappiness, the strap on my watch broke when I was at the BCSFA meeting yesterday, so for now, it’s a pocket watch. Sigh. It always really depresses me when my clothes break, and this counts.

It was a terrible crime, to which the watch was clearly an accessory.

Oh, and to top it all off, the computer I am typing this on just crashed. Again. That’s the second time today. I wish I knew what the hell caused that. As far as I can tell, my computer just gets crashy sometimes. It’s like some kind of seizure disorder. The computer is quite ancient…. perhaps it is developing senile dementia.

Join the freaking club.

Oh, and one more thing : I really feel like I am forgetting some terribly important assignment. I have checked all my course websites and there’s nothing there that I didn’t already know was there (I have to bring original photographs and original audio to Creative Writing, for example), but I can’t shake the feeling that I am missing something big and that I had better find it pronto or I am in deep dookie.

Whether that is my meta-consciousness sort of half-assedly doing its job right or just a product of my fevered and paranoid imagination remains to be seen.

That’s the sort of thing you have to deal with when you are habitually absentminded. A lot of the time it seems, at least to more mentally organized people, like we forgetful types just don’t care enough to remember things, but it’s not true.

We care deeply, which is why sometimes we are seized with the sensation that we are forgetting something terribly important and if we don’t remember it, something horrible will happen.

That’s been true often enough in our lives that it makes us paranoid and fearful. I have had nightmares about forgetting something important and not being able to remember what it was. They are some of the worst nightmares I have ever had, presumably they are so damned plausible.

If it was just a matter of caring enough, I wouldn’t have any problem at all. But there’s just something about certain minds like mine that leads to information coming in and going right back out again easily.

Honestly, it’s like a learning disability. You can learn to cope with it, but you can’t ever get rid of it.

So I will wrack my brain for stuff I need to do. I have emailed my Intro to Journalism prof to see if the first draft of our “blog post” (in order words, final essay) is due tomorrow. If it is, um, oops. It’s not the 300 to 400 words that worries me, of course. As if. It’s the five references I have to find to back up what I am saying.

I don’t prove what I say, dammit. You either agree with my reasoning or you don’t. Proving is for science!

Well…. and journalism. Dammit.

I hope my prof gets back to me soon, because if it IS due tomorrow, that means I gotta hustle like crazy. I don’t even have a topic picked from the list yet. There must be something on there that interests me.

Yeah, it’s sort of lame that I have to use one from a list of preselected topics. But I understand. A lot of people are jsut not equipped to come up with their own. Especially all those “excellent sheep” millennials who are used to just doing what they are told and are therefore utterly lost when asked to express themselves or do things on their own initiative.

I mean, I have never been great at that second one either, but still. I feel bad for these kids.

Having the rough draft in on time is only worth 5 percent of the final mark, but that’s a lot. That’s like one twentieth of it. I would hate to just throw five percent out the window just like that.

Plus I have to do my usual Monday assignment. Sigh. The student’s life is not an easy one.

And, of course, the real irony in all of this is that I was bored and restless Saturday. If I had just pulled my cranium out of my rectum long enough to realize it would be wise to see if I had schoolwork, I could have done it then.

What can I say. I am good at everything but reality.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In case you missed the title to this post, I am about to talk about my penis. Oh, and peeing. Trigger warning or whatever.

I had genital warts. That’s had, in the past tense. But we will get to that.

It started when I first noticed that my urine stream was bifurcating. Two streams, not one. I thought, that’s weird. But I wasn’t experiencing any pain and it was more of a curiosity than anything else, so because despite my intellect I have the mentality of a preschooler, I figured it wasn’t a problem and stopped thinking about it.

And that continues as my urine stream got more and more scattered until I was basically a sprinkler. Seriously, I could aim directly at the center of the bowl and have it still not catch it all. This was getting inconvenient.

Then, after way, way too long, I thought “Gee, maybe I should give myself an inspection at the source of the problem to make sure this isn’t an edema or something. ” ^[1]

And to my horror, I found that the entrance to my foreskin (I am uncut) covered in little knobby things. Uh oh…. that can’t possible be good!

Once more using my practically kindergartner level of maturity, I more or less ignored the problem after that. Again, it didn’t hurt and didn’t cause me a lot of problems, and it freaked me the hell out to think about it, so…. I didn’t.

Think about it, that is. This is known as the Ostrich Defense. Ignore it, maybe it will go away! Either way, at least you are not upset about it any more! Problem solved. In the most childish way possible.

This lasted until the next time I had to go in to see my GP to get my meds refilled. He could tell I was really worried about something. I dropped trou for him, and he took one look at my happy little friend, grinned, and reassuringly said “You appear to have genital warts. ”

I said “Really? How’d I end up with them?”

His grin got a little bigger. “Well, they’re believed to be sexually transmitted. ”

I said, “That’s impossible, because I haven’t had sex with anyone but myself for like a year. ”

I don’t think he believed me. But he added some kind of medicated cream to my prescriptions. End of story, right? Un, no. Because when I went to get my prescriptions filled, the pharmacist had never even heard of the cream in question, and when he looked it up, it turned out to be really expensive and not covered by my MSP.

So, stupidly, I said I would go back to my doctor and get it all straightened out. What I should have said was “You know what? Why don’t you call my doctor’s office for clarification on Monday. That will be a lot faster than me getting an appointment, and the result would be the same. ”

But I didn’t say that, and so it was up to me to make an appointment and go back. And so I went right back into Ostrich mode, and never made that appointment, and so forth.

But then, just today, I was urinating and noticed I had a normal urine stream again. I checked myself out, and lo and behold, the darn things had gone away all on their own. Every now and then I repeat the inspection just to make sure they really are gone and I didn’t dream the whole thing.

So, yay erectile liberation day! I would love to be able to say I learned a valuable lesson from all this, but nope. All I learned is that ignoring your problem really does work sometimes, and that’s a terrible lesson by anyone’s standards.

Even Donald Trump.

And perhaps that is why I have not found myself feeling depressed today, even though I once more ended up with no clean clothes to wear on Saturday and so I have been nuding it up all day. That little bit of lovely good news, that I once more had a wart free tallywhacker, buoyed me up enough that I haven’t really minded today being so quiet and lonely.

Plus, I think I am learning to just relax and be cool about it. I’ve made peace with the fact that I am going to be lazy and unproductive on Saturdays, and heck, maybe that’s for the best.

I mean, everyone needs a day off, even students, right?

And if, at some point, I decide I want to get something or other done, I would approach it without pressure and without fear, knowing that I can do it or not, and both are totally cool, and there’s no need to get frustrated about it.

If I am bored and restless, I know the cure. Do something. There’s a world of possibilities at my fingertips. I have lots of things I can do, some productive, others just for fun.

Or I could sleep all day. That’s cool too. The problem comes when I let the sleepiness freak me out and make me feel like I am drowning in a somnolent sea. If I am tired of sleeping and don’t want to be sleepy any more, I know the cure for that too : get up and move around. Do something active. That is usually enough to switch gears into drive.

And if not, maybe I really need that sleep and I should do what my body wants me to do.

The trick is to not get too attached to outcomes. Especially when they don’t really matter at all. If I never get around to doing something important, that’s a problem. But if it’s just something I thought I might try, then what does it matter?

Right now, I am going to go lie down. Maybe I will sleep. Maybe not. Either way is cool.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] I know a weirdly large number of medical terms for someone who hasn’t so much taken a biology class since Grade Ten. Just part of my enormous bulging vocabulary, I guess. [[1]

Dammit. I was trying so hard to get out here on time! But no. I just HAD to finish the episode of Scrubs I was watching because I am a compulsive completer and not in full control of myself.

So now I will have to wait for the next bus, and be late for class and miss stuff.

And I HATE missing stuff.

Especially because we are doing such neat stuff lately. Last week it was vision and hearing. This week it’s memory. Keen gear!

So I am sitting hear willing a 405 to show up. The one I missed was the 12:24, so I am hoping the next is at 12:44. But even if it’s 12:54, I will be at the school by 1 or so, so I will not miss much.

(—)

Waiting for the bus home now. That was quick.

Turns out the next bus was at 12:44, so no worries there. In fact, I should change my schedule to 12:44. Dunno why I would want to get to school at 12:30 anyhow, unless I wanted to eat lunch there.

Not too likely.

Turn out we had an exam today. We had two an a quarter hours to finish it. Took me less than half an hour. In fact, I missed being the first one done by a matter of seconds. Some smugly pleased with herself girl finished right before me. I would like to think I would have handled being first with a little more dignity and restraint, but that is by no means guaranteed.

I wouldn’t have done a half-pirouette when turning away from the prof, though. That i know  for sure.

Not even on my good leg.

I, obviously, did not study for this exam. How could I? The first inkling I had that there was an exam today was when I walked into the classroom  and felt all the tension and fear in the room.

I am so glad I don’t get that way myself.

(—)

Back home, had supper and a nap, ready to resume blogging.

I wanted to resume the moment I got home, but I decided I would be better off waiting till after supper, because once I have blogged, that’s it for today. I have no homework outstanding and I don’t have anything I need to do besides laundry that I can think of offhand. So I have to be careful about when I do the blog entry thing.

Time it right, and the rest of the night will feel like time off. Get it wrong, and I do it too late and end up not enjoying it as much because I feel like I am working against the clock, or I do it too early and the rest of the day feels like a burden instead of a vacation.

Just more senseless hours to slog through. Think I will take a nap.

Doing after supper seems about right. I eat, relax, watch stuff on Netflix, drink my Diet Coke, then come into blogging with a head of enthusiasm/caffeine.

They’re sort of the same thing.

At least, when I can be at one with the caffeine, it’s the same thing. Most of my life, caffeine and I had a troubled and distant relationship. I avoided colas for the most part and never got into coffee or tea. Hell, that would probably still be my preference if I hadn’t developed Type II diabetes and had to switch to drinking Diet Coke when I am out.

See, before that, I avoided caff because it did bad things to me. It made me tense and nervous and gave me a headache. Sometimes it would give me a full blown panic attack.

More on that later.

But once the diabetic Diet Coke thing happened, I sort of had to deal with it, and eventually I realized that the problem was that I had this passive numb paralyzed personality that was, in effect, too heavy for the caffeine to lift. I inherently resisted anything that prompted me toward action, and well, all that energy has to go somewhere. So it went into making me miserable.

It’s like a microcosm of depression itself.

Nowadays, I can ride the black tide of caffeine at least some of the time. It’s really a matter of opening the door to it in my mind. And putting the energy to use ASAP, so it doesn’t have a chance to turn into something ugly.

Honestly, I think that’s a big part of dealing with depression in the first place. They say depression is anger turned inward, and they are totally right. I have written before about how depression makes you both the torture victim and the tortured, the abused and the abuser. You take it out on yourself because that’s easier and safer than actually confronting your problems.

And ever so convenient.

But I think that to a lesser extent, everything gets turned inwards. Your energy, your inspiration, your emotions, everything is trapped within you, and that makes the pressure rise within you. If that happens for long enough, you end up so full of unexpressed everything that you feel like a overfilled water balloon. And that makes you feel like you have to move slowly and carefully or you will burst.

Oh, one last thing. On the subject of panic attacks. This cracked article made me realize the difference between panic attacks and depression with panic expression in a big way.

I mean holy SHIT. Makes me glad for the problems I do not have, let me tell ya that. I have had some pretty serious panic attacks, but none so bad they made me scream for help and end up in Emergency. Also, they have rarely come out of the blue. They usually had a very clear stimulus, namely social pressure. And there was a medicine, Paxil, that has worked extremely well with relatively minor side effects.

That article, then, makes me thank my lucky stars that I am as relaxed and functional as I am.

We all can use a little perspective on our own troubles now and then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t know what to call that. Vlogging is already take. Videologging?

First off… Music from Mars!

Not frigging bad, me! Slow, thoughtful, funky but also enjoyably creepy. Apart from the 2001 quotes (HAL lives!) it could easily be the intro song of some Art Bell type show. Like at the end, you would hear “Good evening, and welcome to Fringe Element, a podcast that explores the outer limits of human knowledge… ”

I picture that being said in a quiet, gentle, sexy male voice of some earnest liberal arts major at a small but groovy college somewhere in Northern Ontario.

I have listened to SO MUCH CBC.

Next, we have the last entry in my epic four flavour journey through the last round of interesting Lay’s flavours.

Isn’t that exciting, kids?

Did the therapy thing today. No major motion there. I told him about my latest doofus move. On the way there, I thought it would be really hard to tell him about it because it would mean that I had neglected the documents we both (him more than me) worked hard on for a whole session, namely that disability shite, for like, two months.

Then I got there and it wasn’t even a thing. I told him, it was way easier than I thought it would be, and I suffered absolutely zero consequences from the act. Like I said, it wasn’t even a thing.

That made me realize that the whole mode of thinking that led me to be worried is flawed and self-destructive.

More after a video.

God that show was a waste of time.

The thought process that led to me being all worried that I was going to offend him somehow with my lack of submitting that disability form is bogus. Its error is the classic mistake of vastly overestimating how much other people’s lives revolve around you and what you do. Maybe somewhere within Costin’s mind, he was a little miffed at me. But it’s a trivial matter. And he’s a professional, and primarily concerned with my mental health and wellbeing, not the minutiae of my life. I was worried over absoluting nothing and for no good reason.

I feel like my task now is to follow this malfunctioning cognitive function to its roots, and cut it out there. Strike at the heart of the beast, and so on. Add this error to my list of Cognitive Errors To Look Out for.

My overactive superego loves that kind of thing.

And now, a video from a really dark part of my life.

Namely, when I was watching that goddamned Residue show. This was months ago, and yet the wounds seem very fresh. Hours of my life wasted on something that went nowhere, did nothing, and gave nothing back to the viewer. Grr!

Perhaps one day, I will look back upon that blighted era and laugh. Laugh at how silly it all seems now, and wonder that I could ever take something as trivial as a science fiction (ish) TV show so seriously.

But that time has not yet come.

The thing is, metacognitive solutions are inherently cognitive and thus superego-driven. I am too cerebral and uncomfortable with things I don’t understand and can’t predict for an entirely id-based solution, even though I know that the road to recovery for me depends on my connecting with and reviving my sadly neglected id.

I really need some fancy transporter mechanics to put my two Kirks back together.

So I have to take the slower and more cautious cognitive approach to fixing my brain, where each step makes sense to me and I feel like I am in control.

It’s kind of sad, really,

And now, more creepy music.

Wow, that accelerated quickly, didn’t it? Can’t say it’s one of my best, but it’s decent. It’s musically interesting, which is the next best thing to being musically successful. If not else, it’s unpredictable.

And my stuff usually isn’t. At least, not to me. For obvious reasons.

I wish merging with my id was as simple as hooking up a VCR. Just run some RCA cabling between the id and the ego/superego complex, and turn it on. Bingo! Fully integrated personality.

But of course, that would involve a lot of unpredictable things that don’t make sense happening in my mind, and I can’t handle that. At least, not yet. I have suppressed myself so hard for so long that if someone were to say “Just do what you feel like doing!”, I honestly would have no idea what that was.

Something involving good food and a good massage, I guess. But it’s only a guess.

I mean, who the fuck am I? What do I want? What do I crave? What inspires me? What takes me in the direction of happiness? What draws me to it?

What the hell is going on around here, anyway?

Next clip : a longish talker.

I’d like to add that the people shushing the little boy in my version don’t know why they are doing it. They would be unable to articulate what exactly the little boy did wrong. They would only know that they were angry and embarrassed (especially his parents) and felt a very deep disturbance in the waters of their life, and it was the little boy’s fault.

They don’t have to know how you are shaking the tree they are all in. They don’t have to know why, either. They just have to feel the shaking and do whatever it takes to make it stop.

It is really that simple. These people are acting on instinct and emotion. Even if your parents are highly intelligent and educated, like mine are, they are still going to act to maintain social stability, no matter how pure the little boy’s intentions were when he pointing at the Emperor’s danglies and laughed.

I think that’s something all us nerdy types go through growing up. You’ve embarrassed your parent and they are mad at you and you don’t understand why.

The sad thing is…. some people never make it out of that stage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.