Update : I am feeling a lot better than I did yesterday. So I screwed up in a way I have done many times before. Nothing I can do about it now. All I can do is do what I can to fix the problem and get on with my life.

Tried to courier the document today, but the UPS store was closed for Remembrance Day. Whatever. I got dressed, got out, got moving, got around. It kept today from being like Saturday, nothing in particular to do except blogging.

Oh, plus I have a Creative Writing assignment due tomorrow. Gotta remember that.

I figure it won’t take them long to process it when they get it. There aren’t any complications like equipment or personnel requests, my diagnoses are simple, I don’t have a learning disability. And I assume that at this time of year, they are not exactly dealing with a massive backlog.

Actually, it may be a blessing in disguise that I couldn’t courier it today. I vaguely recall Doctor Costin saying that I needed to get the thing stamped by the disability people at Kwantlen before handing it in. It would be a shame (to put it mildly) to fuck up on something simple and stupid again.

If so, then I will have to make an appointment, because apparently Kwantlen’s commitment to people with disabilities doesn’t extend to having a full time disability coordinator or whatever. Appointments are made over the phone, which is ever so modern, and so I can’t make an appointment till tomorrow.

Curses. Foiled again.

Not being able to do something important because of a stat holiday happens to be disturbingly often. Weird.

Oh yeah. Better cover Remembrance, lest I forget.

Like I always say around this time of year, back home in my home town, in the park in what was the center of town when I was growing up (the center has drifted north due to development), there is a memorial of the usual statue of soldiers on a base covered with the names of the lost on it kind.

And on that last is two of my grand-uncles. Men I never got to meet because they died in World War II. Men who never got to come home to their large Acadian families. Men who were never important, powerful, or famous. Men who died on some hill somewhere and whose death was just another statistic in a war far bigger and more important than they were. Men whose lived on in the hearts and minds of their loved ones for weeks, maybe even months, until that fateful knock on their door killed them for good.

It is those men I mourn and respect today. I don’t go to any services here because they would make me far too homesick. Being at another person’s Remembrance would make me feel all the more keenly the fact that I am not at mine.

So all I can do is remember in my own way, and do my best to put how I feel into words, and carry on.

I’m beginning to feel like that is all that life is about…. carrying on. No matter what. Doing the next thing. And the next. See a mountain of tasks as if each task is a rung on a ladder that leads to where you want to go. Don’t waste time looking up the ladder and telling yourself you could never climb all those rungs. You’re right, you can’t. Taking all those rungs at once is impossible. But you can climb one rung over and over again. And if you keep doing that, eventually, you get there.

It’s the difference between thinking of a task as a whole (right brain) or as a sequence (left brain). I think maybe us creative types, especially those of us with depression, get trapped by our tendency to want to view things as united wholes. Any task, even something as simple as combing your hair, can seem like an enormous crushing burden if you imagine it stretching out infinitely into the future.

But the thing is, you will never have to do a lifetime’s worth of hair combing at once. You will only have to do a day’s worth. The true nature of the task is segmented and something easily accomplished. Viewing it as a monumental task is a trick of the mind, a self-sabotaging trick of the highest degree, and the true thing being denied and suppressed is the knowledge that you can actually do these things.

Not “you could do it if you were normal” or “you could do them in theory” or “you should be able to do them, you loser!”. You actually could do them. You could get up right now and go do them.

All you have to do is change viewing angles so that all you see is the one task in front of you. You’re not deluding yourself. Viewing it as a whole is delusional because it makes you see a small task as a huge burden that you have to shoulder all at once. That is just plain crazy.

Do the next thing. Live life one day at a time. Only worry about what you have to get done today. Hell, only worry about what you have to get done next. There is a huge difference between moving a boulder and moving a boulder’s weight in pebbles. And it’s perfectly legit to bust that boulder up.

And if you find yourself resisting that idea, if that idea in fact scares you and makes you incredibly uncomfortable, ask yourself why. What is it in you that makes you afraid of something that would make your life better? What terrible thing awaits you if you open the door to genuine hope?

What is your depression protecting? And is it worth it? What have you sacrificed in order to never have to deal with this thing?

And wouldn’t you rather be happy?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Oh, and you all remember what it means when I switch to the second person, right? Good. )

I fucked up big time.

I am a colossal fool.

I don’t like myself right now.

So, I found out why I don’t have my money. It is because I forgot to submit that disability form months ago. Now I have to send it in. And it can take six weeks to process that disability form. Which would mean I am fucked.

I am going to speed things up by couriering it. But then my fate will once more be in the hands of government, and this time, I will have even less of an idea when the money will happen.

I am so sick of tripping over my own placid ignorance all the time. I am trying  hard to get my shit together but sometimes it feel like I will never catch up and there will always be that one thing I forget that bites me on the assets and makes me look, and feel, like an idiot.

I know I say this every time I do something like this, but I really do feel like I need a handler. Someone alert, competent, and organized. Some thorough,  hardworking, conscientious, and reliable. Someone, in short, who is everything I am not.

Unfortunately, Joe already has a job.

I am thinking of going out to eat after class. (Oh, right. I am in class now.) I have the money left over in this week’s budget, more or less, and I could really use something to lift my spirits, I am going to try to avoid going to White Spot, though. This neighborhood is full of restaurants I have not tried and some of them serve food my roomies don’t care for ergo, I don’t usually get to eat them. I could really go for some Indian or Mexican food.

Either way, it involves spicy bean dishes.

No guarantees  though.  I might go for tried and true instead. Maybe they serve nachoes at White Spot.

(—)

Sigh. Here I am at White Spot. I tried to find an alternative. I downloaded the Yellow Pages app and checked out what was around there. I walked up Ackroyd looking at and considering each restaurant I saw. I even went into Ebisu (sushi joint, has the little conveyor belt thing, love it) with full intent to buy, byte the only seats they had were at the bar, and I hate eating at the bar.

Always results in a sore neck and neck and hence a poorly digested meal. This is the price I pay for being of above average height.

I am kind of racing the clock tonight. I don’t have much battery life left. But I am determined to keep blogging until the battery runs out or I am done eating, whichever comes first.

The lack of battery life almost convinced me to skip eating out. After all, without being able to blog to my heart’s content, it wouldn’t be the “full experience” of dining out.

Luckily, I recognized that as whiny loser thinking and set out anyhow.

Food is here, more on this later.

(—)

One nutritional interlude later….

(trigger warning : acetic acid )

Wow, they have malt vinegar here!

I guess it is not impossible for me to benefit from something becoming trendy after all. Malt vinegar is tres chic these days. Aparrently it is super good for you. And I learned this from a pretty intelligent group of furries (the crowd at my usual hangout) so I am more inclined to believe it than if it was some article on the Internet somewhere.

And they claimed adding a little malt vinegar made a huge difference in their life. Better digestion, more energy, a cleansed feeling. And we are talking about just a couple of tablespoons a day.

Myself, I like the taste, and have some fond memories attached to it, but there is something more. It’s like I am drawn to it. I assume that it fulfills some obscure nutritional deficit that my usual diet can’t address.

I shall look it up on Wikipedia when I get home.

Fries round two hath arrived. More later.

(—)

681 words while out. Not bad!

Home now, natch. Ended up playing a lot of woosh tag with the wait staff ’cause the Spot was jumpin’, especially for a random Tuesday night in November.

Whoosh tag is where you are talking to the wait staff (nice girl, didn’t catch her name) and you say one thing and they whoosh off. Then, you wait for them to come back, because by the time they are back, you need another thing, or you still have things you wanted the first time but never got a chance to ask for because WHOOSH!

So it took me a surprisingly large number of requests to get my drink, my vinegar, my meal, my refills, my second wave of fries, and the extra napkins I always end up needing.

I don’t know about malt vinegar’s other health claims, but it sure as hell cleared out my sinuses.

No big deal. My battery lasted longer (and for more words) than I thought it would. Although I should give serious consideration to bringing a backup means of entertainment with me, tho. Like a book.

Speaking of books, we watched clips from The Human Zoo, a series by Desmond morris based on his book of the same name, which I own. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a series to go with the book, but it does delight me, and I shall try to find a way to watch it in its entirety.

There was also some stuff about the Stanford Prison Experiment, hosted by none other than Doctor Philip Zimbardo, the guy behind the notorious experiment. Funny how a guy can turn being the central figure in a study so widely considered evil that it gets mentioned in the same breath as the Milgram experiences into being an international best selling author, TV host, textbook advisor, and evil beard model.

Smooth move, Zimbardo!

There was one memorable moment in the footage of the experiment. At one point, one of the prisoners gets really rebellious and starts yelling at the guards, and at one point he yells “Fuck you, and FUCK Doctor Zimbardo!”

That made me laugh. I was the only one laughing tho.

Well, that’s my words, folks. Don’t worry, I am already like half-over this latest screwup. I’ll be fine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well yesterday largely sucked. I mean, I wasn’t contemplating self-harm or anything, but it was still pretty craptacular. So what can I do to keep that from happening again?

Well, clearly making ambitious plans that seem fun and rewarding doesn’t work. Not by itself, anyhow. I had such big plans on Friday, but by the time I was awake enough to try them, I was too depressed. The very idea of throwing myself into an ambitious new project just for the heck of it seemed repulsive and insane, like going for a jog on two broken legs.

So clearly, I have top intervene a lot sooner. Starting with making sure I have clean clothes to wear. A very big part of learning to deal with your depression is learning to proactively nullify your usual excuses. Excuses are the base currency of depression. Depression itself is one giant excuse not to deal with the real world and whatever it is that you imagine is in it that is so bad that you would rather retreat into depression that face it.

Usually, this is unresolved trauma. To go forward is to face the things you stomped on the breaks to avoid. Since then, you have only trusted the slowest of motion. Anything else makes you feel like you are going out of control, and you are… out of the control of your depression and its determination to do whatever it takes in order to avoid dealing with stuff.

Is that leaves you feeble and miserable, that’s just fine. Makes you easier to manage.

So yeah, step one, make sure I have clean clothes to put on. Then put them on. I realized while I was in the shower that I have been clinging to an old outdated belief that hanging around nekkid on Saturday “saved” me a day of laundry. And that made sense in the old place, where I couldn’t do my own laundry and when Julian did it for me, it cost me money.

But it’s a year and two months since we moved, and we have our own washer-drier right here in the apartment, and so I can do laundry whenever the hell I want.

Which is great, because now that I am going to school, I do two loads a week! That would have been very trying on both Julian and my wallet, no to mention all that extra bus time.

Looking back, if we hadn’t moved, I probably wouldn’t be going to school now. So, lame gym or not, I am glad we moved here. It is so easy to get places!

Anyhow, back to laundry. (FINALLY, you all say. ) So yeah, put on the clothes and wear them all day, whether I am up or down, even if I decide to take a nap. I have been trying to train myself that naked + bed = going to sleep for the night, and having a day where I don’t follow that rule is quite injurious to that process.

The key to training is always consistency. Especially when you are training yourself.

Opening a few windows probably couldn’t hurt either. Part of what kept putting me to sleep yesterday was that, sitting here at the computer, I am close to the baseboard heater in this room and that makes things all toasty warm here, and we all know by now that toasty warmness makes me really sleepy.

Then again, in the summer, it was the fact that being close to a window when I am at this desk that was making me sleepy because it was cooler than the rest of the room.

I guess the unifying principle is relief. Whether it’s relief from cold or heat, relief makes me melt into a puddle. And with toasty warmness, there is the added bonus that getting in bed and burrowing under the covers continues the toasty warmness, and hence, being toasty warm at the computer reminds me of how nice it is to be feeling the same, but lying down.

And so I ended up spending half the day in bed yesterday. This would not be a big deal if it made me happy. It would be totally fine if I took Saturdays to be my “lie in bed and catch up on sleep” day every week. That way I would look forward to it as opposed to viewing it with a thick cold glutinous dread.

But I am not there yet. Being sleepy all day still makes me feel depressed and helpless and lost. It makes me feel like I can’t stop myself from slipping into depression on my own, I need something like getting to school and back to keep me functional. Without it, I am the same sad person I was before I went back to school.

Only way more aware of the sadness than before. Yay.

But I know that’s the wrong way to be looking at things. I know that’s a negativist way of looking at it. It’s like there’s this grim satisfaction in seeing the world and your situation in the worst possible way. Like that’s how you get your kicks, with self-sadism. Or that’s how to express emotions without involving even the possibility of other people.

Because that’s where the real hope lies : connecting with your fellow human beings. Science says it, religion says it, the deep empathy lurking in the human heart says it. It’s something I can scarcely even imagine without a host of panic alarms going off in my head. Can I even stand connecting with someone and seeing myself in their eyes? Or would the identity feedback be too much, and I would have to flee to someplace where nobody understands me?

Perhaps in time, as I heal, that sort of thing won’t panic me any more. Maybe a stronger and healthier me will be able to let down his guard and let people in and finally end that isolation that I have locked myself into for all these years.

And then, finally, Spring will come.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once again, I am somewhat depressed on Saturday. But I think I know why.

For one, I’ve been hanging out naked, something I keep telling myself I will never do again, but always seems to happen around now. My excuse this time was that I had no clean laundry to put on, but I still have a pair of red sweatpants kicking around here somewhere that a perfect for Laundry Day attire. So that dog don’t hunt.

And the thing is, I know from my experience living in a nudist-ish household in the past that when I am going nudist, I end up in this sort of soft squishy depressed mindset where I just plain can’t get going.

One of the many things going to Kwantlen has done for me is give me a reason to get dressed every day. When I am dressed, I am more focused and alert and ready to face whatever comes. Naked, I am a depressed, bed-seeking, life-avoiding shut-in who wants to crawl down a hole and hide from the world.

And I don’t wanna be that guy any more. Fuck that guy. He’s a deeply unhappy person.

Part of me still wants to be there, though, and it will take a while before the desire to turn into a puddle and flow down the drain is gone from me completely. I am still in the process of convincing myself that it is okay to be out there in the world without ready access to my bed or other methods of comfort.

Indeed, going out to face the big bad world makes coming home to be cozy and relaxed a million times better. Which is why, I suppose, Saturdays are depressing to me. No daily thing to keep me focused and give me direction except for blogging, and blogging is not enough by itself.

I’d be lost without it though. If I didn’t even have blogging to keep me stitched together, I would end up in a very, very bad frame of mind. I just plain can’t imagine my life without this blog now. As long as I do my 1000 words a day, my thoughts and emotions have a regular way out. It’s not always the ones I thought I was going to be expressing, but it’s all stuff that needs to be expressed, so it’s all good.

So once more, I cherish and adore everyone who reads this blog. You help keep me sane.

I felt really great yesterday, and that’s not worth ignoring. I honestly think the key must have been hydration. I arrived at class with a 2L bottle of tap water, down that in like half an hour, then on break I refilled it, and drank THAT over the next two hours. That’s 4L of water!

So sure, I had to pee a lot yesterday and today. But if it puts me in that good of a mood, it’s worth it a thousand times over.

When I go back to class on Monday, it will be with plenty of water. Maybe I have been nursing a bad case of hypo-dehydration for a long time, and it took actually listening to my body and obeying my thirst to realize it.

Now I want to go back in time and take those “OBEY YOUR THIRST” 7up ads and just remove the 7up part of them. Obey your thirst in general, folks. Drink as much water as it demands. Drink till your body tells you to stop. And don’t go into it with any preconceptions as to how much that will be, either.

As with me, it could turn out to be one heck of a lot. Especially the first time.

I shouldn’t be surprised I ended up skirting dehydration. I went like five days without diabetes meds, and that led to a heck of a lot of urination. Enough so that it kept me from getting good sleep!

I hate it when that happens.

And ya know, if output outstrips input, you end up with a serious deficit. No wonder I needed all that water. Makes me wonder if I could still be in deficit.

This clearly warrants further experimentation. Time to drink more water!

Another thing I am working on : letting go of unnecessary expectations. For example, I know that yesterday I had big big plans for today. And I know that the odds are that blogging is all I will accomplish for today.

And that is fine. When it comes to things I am doing on my own, with no extrinsic motivation, I have to tread a very fine line between not punishing myself and not giving up on myself. I want to be able to fill my time when I feel bored and depressed, but I don’t want that to turn into something dark and ugly that my depression can use to pummel and punish me.

I want to nurture the desire for productive labor, not punish it!

I do have homework I could work on. But it involves reading this interminably long and impenetrably dense free verse poem and I am going to have to work my way up to that because it is nonfun.

However, once I do read it and select which “hour” of it (cor, what a giveaway) I like most/hate least, I get to write a poem in response to it, and I know I will enjoy that.

That’s the thing about being a writer. While every good writer has to be a good reader first, that does not mean we want to read other people’s writing. We still have our own tastes, after all, and while there will be some connection between what we like and what we write, it might not be an obvious one.

And that goes ten times over for poetry. So having to read all this dense BS that doesn’t seem to want to actually tell me anything directly is going to be a chore.

When it comes to poetry, I would much rather be writing it than reading it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is a pause…. Oh wait, its over.

(—)

Ahem. Now I am on break. But I had to refill my water bottle and go pee, and that took most of the time.

Can you use milk chocolate to make chocolate milk? Making it milk chocolate chocolate milk?

(—)

Waiting  for my drugs at the pharmacy. Needed  a refill on my psychological drugs. REALLY  needed it, as it turns out.

See, I got the script yesterday, but figured I could wait till today to fill it. Ha ha ha. I was out of Quetiapine. As a result, I did not sleep well last night.

Ironically, in the same session in which he wrote me my prescriptions, my therapist suggested that I might want to consider cutting back on the Q now that I am on Trazadone. I was not keen on the idea. What I have now works and that makes me disinclined towards any tinkering with it.

And then, that night, I end up stumbling into doing a no-Q experiment anyway. And the results were not promising for the “cut back on Quetiapine” agenda. I slept some, but it was lousy quality sleep.

And to cap it all off, when refilling my little pill box, I discovered that I was not, in fact, out of Quetiapine. Meaning I went through a night of lousy sleep and the inability to stay asleep for nothing.

Life must find me hilarious.

(—)

Aaaand now I’m home.

I’ve had a really good day. Class was great! We were studying sensation and perception, and that’s a very cool topic. We learned cool stuff I didn’t know about the eye, like how there’s a part of the retina called the fovea centralis and it’s the focal point of the eye…. literally. It’s the spot on the retina upon which the light gathered by the eye is focused by the lens. Speaking of the lens, I did not know before today that it does this focusing job by growing thicker or thinning.

I am not sure how I thought it was done before today. I guess I assumed it was passive. That the lenses in your eyes were the same as the lenses in your glasses or in a telescope : a fixed object manipulated by other things.

But nope! Your lenses are pretty amazing, and without it, you would live in a very blurry world.

I also learned that rods and cones are not distributed evenly at all. In textbooks they always make it look like your retina is one uniform sheet of rods and cones, side by side.

But in fact, cones are mostly found in the fovea. In fact, the fovea has no rods. The rest of the retina is rods with only a few cones here and there.

Now cones are extremely precise, but they need a lot of light to function. Rods are not nearly as precise, but they can operate with way, way less light.

You can kind of see why we need both. Early humans on the savannah would have needed high detail vision for hunting and gathering. But they would also need good night vision because the only way humans can be safe on the savannah is if they surround themselves with fires to keep the animals away, and that takes people to stay up and keep those fires burning as well as remain vigilant in general.

I am pretty sure that’s where us night owls come from. We are the ones who tend the fires. (How awesome does THAT sound?)

We also had the time to do some of hearing, and that’s very cool too, although there is always a part of learning about hearing that I don’t like, and that’s the part where you realize just how fucking complicated hearing it.

I mean, we all know about the eardrum, otherwise known as the tympanic membrane. The layperson understanding is that the eardrum vibrates, and thus, we hear.

But nooooo. The eardrum vibrates, and that vibrates a bone, which is connected to another bone, which is connected to a third bone, which vibrates into your bony labyrinth, which vibrates the fluid in your cochlea, which vibrates this little flap, which vibrates these little hairs, and it’s the little hairs which actually generate the electrical impulses we experience as “sound”.

Even though the number of moving parts is around the same, that seems so much more complicated than the clean simple design of the eye to me. And ridiculous. I mean, look at this :

Pictured : your bony labyrinth. Not nearly as goth as it sounds, is it?

THAT is your bony labyrinth. The spiral bit is the cochlea. Looks like something that would crawl out of a Lovecraftian sea, doesn’t it? Crossed with Doctor Seuss.

So hearing isn’t nearly as simple as vision. And it’s only going to get more complicated from here, because next, I assume, will be touch, which is a pressure sense of an entirely different kind and actually incorporates a bunch of different senses running in parallel on the skin, and then it’s on to taste and smell, otherwise known as the chemical senses, which are so simple and primitive in their structure and function that they are actually really hard to figure out.

Kind of like our livers. We know the liver does a lot of super important things, some that don’t seem at all related to one another, and yet it’s just this big blob of liver cells.

Anyhow, to sum up (I can do that now and then!), I have had a great day. Class was great, I chatted a bit with the prof after, took the bus home, missed my stop for the pharmacy but walked there and back anyhow (fuck you, Jagoff), came home, fucked around on the computer some, masturbated to completion (not easy with all the drugs I’m on), had a pleasant dinner, and then came in here to get my blog on.

And now, I will lay down, do some crossword puzzles, and maybe nap.

All in all, an excellent day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, in my favorite White Spot, sipping my Diet Coke,tapping away on the virtual keyboard  to y’all. But you already  knew  that.

The twist is that it is 9:33 pm and this is a stop on my way home from Creative Writing class. I decided  that I have more than enough  slack in my budget  to afford an indulgence, and decided  that said indulgence would be a late night trip to White Spot.

Interbellum refers, in this case refers to the fact that, as far as I know, I am between  major projects at school, and I plan to enjoy it as long as it lasts,  or until I get really bored, whichever comes first.

If I get bored enough,  I might even do a video.

The next video I upload will  be my 400th, and I feel like I should do something special to mark the occasion. I suppose if I am feeling especially  ambitious /bored, I could do a “best of” compilation of videos 300-399. I would have to do it in sections of ten clips, though, or maybe twenty, in order to avoid overloading my video editing program.

That could be a lot of fun. It would give me a reason to go through my videos and thus go back in time and visit my own past. I am old enough  now that reminiscence is its own reward, so that should  be fun.

Of course, I could go all the way back to video number one…

Stay tuned. I might go crazy in a really productive and amusing way.

I submitted my Annotated Bibliography of the Stroop Effect online  today. I am sure  there was a million things I could have done to make it better, and I really did try to make it the best it could be, but at a certain point you have to just let it go, and let the chips fall where they may.

(—)

(Home now. Nothing speeds the meal along like running out of battery life on the tablet. I was seriously considering getting a dessert before that happened.)

I know I learned a lot while doing the project, and I also grew up a fair bit, so I have already gotten my reward. I am sure it will get modestly good marks. I went over the assignment document many times to make sure I didn’t miss anything. That’s already more due diligence than my old. sloppy, half-assing his way through life (and making a full ass of himself) version of me would have even thought of doing.

It will be some time before I can totally get my shiznits together. I have been a lot of yarn spread out over a lot of distance for a really long time. It takes a while to develop a skeleton and become an upright mammal when you have spent so long slithering on the ground and hoping nobody steps on you.

Word to the wise : people will step on you. How could they avoid it? You’re everywhere!

But after far, far too much deliberation, I have finally decided that skeletons are not, in fact, too much of a commitment, and that having some rigid structure to me would bring a plethora of benefits.

Plethora of benefits. What a euphonic turn of phrase!

Things are going pretty decent for me right now. Even after tonight’s White Spot meal, I still have a $20 surplus in the ol’ budget for this week, and that gives me a warm secure feeling. Maybe I will spend it, maybe I will let it roll into the next week. Right now, I can’t think of anything I want to buy in terms of creature comforts (read : food), but maybe I will get the energy to go to Value Village (a whole two blocks away!) and look for some gloves and a hat.

Yes, a hat. I am not normally a hat person, but my ears were very cold on the walk home and there’s only two solutions for that in my experience : a toque, or earmuffs.

And the only way I’d wear earmuffs is if they were also headphones. Wireless headphones. With USB charging.

Really glad that Stephen Harper is no longer prime minister as of today. Also sort of glad some dude named Justin is prime minister, I guess. But that runs a distant second to the Harper thing. I could not be happier that the country I love, the country of Canada, is no longer in the hands of someone who spent every waking moment destroying everything that was good about Canada while nakedly wallowing in his own crapulence.

It’s like he was just daring someone to stop him, you know? Like he was a bratty submissive looking for someone to discipline him and doing increasingly awful things in an attempt to prompt the swift justice he so clearly craves.

I sometimes think a lot of the conservatism of today is based on this brattiness principle. Old people who can’t remember why they ever gave a shit about anyone getting juvenile enjoyment out of ecstatically soiling every good thing they can get their liver spotted hands then congratulating themselves on getting away with it.

I paint a picture with words.

Harper’s fall, as well as the current slapstick improv troupe nature of the Republican Party down south, rekindles my faith that the senescence of the last dregs of the old guard is truly upon us, and soon they will lose their grip on power completely as their senile decline continues and they revert fully to toddler status and become less interested in politics and more interested in barking at kids on their lawn and how much time it is to their next pudding cup.

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, old people. You were really fucking evil.

Well I guess that’s it for me for the night. Time for me to lay down, do some puzzles, listen to some music, and mellow out like one mellow motherfucker.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am sitting in Intro to Journalism class, on break, wondering what to write.

I swear, I have had SO MANY good ideas for blog topics lately. But I can’t remember  any of them.

Partly, I don’t want to. Not proud of that, but it’s  true. I have been shying away from topic driven blogging  lately because it’s  harder.  There is a lot more mental  overhead  in sticking  to a topic (even as bad a job as I usually  do) and I have been saving that for  my schoolwork.

Gonna put that annotated bibliography  assignment  to bed tonight.  I will  resist  the urge to submit it the moment it’s  done. It is not due till Friday, and I can use the extra time to let it lay fallow  then look it over again and fix whatever is broken

Pretty  radical compared  to my usual  fire and forget methodology .

But I am serious  about mending  my usual sloppy ways. I am capable of so much better. No more coasting on my native  talent. I am going  to, for once  in my life, truly  apply myself to the task at hand. I think I have made  enough progress in developing my mental (and emotional) resources  that I can focus more of my extremely  potent mental energies into a task without the system becoming unstable and freaking me out.

A rocket is only as good as its nozzle.

It won’t  be an overnight job, but the reward  is greatere use of my massive  mental might, and that always leads to a happier me.

You have to be willing to truly invest in life. That whole  “you only get out of it what you put into it” thing.  I have been the worst kind of shrivelled  up constipated miser with my energies because  depression makes you think you have no energy. But the energy is there, it’s  just waiting  for you to activate  it. And to do that, you have to put enough energy into the world in order to get the stimulation you need to activate the rest  of your  energy.

It’s why cars need to ignition  systems. They need something to put in the initial energy in before they can access the energy in the gas tank.  Depressive thinking  would have you believe that if you have to put energy into it, it’s not worth it.

But there is a heck of a lot of cars on the road that say different.

Had an exam today. Totally out of the blue. Um, for me. I am sure the keeners knew. And I was warned last week  but I forgot. So, let’s hope I do as well on this one as I did on the last.

(—)

Back home now. Ate supper, got unpacked.

Luckily, the solution to my problems should be arriving soon : my effing student loan. Tomorrow is the day when it will officially have been ten business days since I submitted the thing, and that’s how long the nice lady at the Post Office said it would take for my money to show up, so…. fingers crossed!

Just checked. Not there yet. Damn.

It will be so nice to just go online and pay Kwantlen what I owe them. Not being able to do so has made me feel like a real piker, and I hate that. I hate owing money. For me, the prompt paying of debts is not merely an act of virtue. It’s a matter of restoring my emotional equilibrium.

Of course, I am cautious. This process has had so many unexpected and inexplicable delays that I would not be surprised if I got an email tomorrow telling me they would only release my money if I literally jumped through actual hoops.

Hoops that are on fire.

Still, obviously, I am looking forward to putting this whole thing behind me. Pay off Kwantlen, pay off Joe, get my texts, and maybe have enough left over for a new pair of shoes and a pair of decent gloves.

That will be such a huge load off my mind that I have trouble even imagining on it. For a responsible sort like me (who also loves predictability and hates uncertainty), this whole thing has been stressful as hell. And stress drains me.

It’s hard to say exactly what my relationship with predictability is. In many ways, I hate it. Predictability is the opposite of mentally stimulating, and I have an outsized need for mental stimulation. Hence my enormous MP3 collection. Thousands of songs, and yet I still feel like I have heard it all (and far too recently) sometimes.

I suppose the distinction is that when it comes to my personal activities, I seek novelty and stimulation, but when it comes to my actual life, I want things to just fucking work. And make sense.

I realize that this is, in many ways, a fragile disposition. Expecting the world to make sense is probably not an optimal mindset for long term happiness, because most of the time, it won’t.

And it’s not like I have a total psychological breakdown if things don’t go how I think they should. It just makes me angry, sometimes with that dangerous long burning anger that just sits there in your chest increasing your background rage level.

Still, sometimes I wish I was more adaptable. I mean, for a Taurus, I am very flexible and adaptable. But that’s like being really tall for a midget. It’s not saying much.

I would like to be better at handling the unexpected, emotionally as well as logistically. It’s a tricky equation with me, because the predictability I crave would come with a big price tag in terms of exerting way, way more control over the variables of my life than I am comfortable with.

I only feel safe when I have the breathing space and maneuverability to respond to situations however the situation dictates. A fixed response seems, to me, to be a recipe for disaster. You have to be like water, and adapt.

That kind of precludes predictability. Or does it?

I am one complicated dude.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still working on that “annotated bibliography” assignment. It’s not due till Friday.

Let’s just say it hasn’t changed my mind about loathing research. I mean, I will learn it and I will do it, but I really dislike it. There’s something about hunting down information that gives me a sadness headache. It makes me feel like I am getting eyestrain from focusing on tiny details for so long.

Like I have said before, my mind is a much better telescope than microscope.

But I have my studies, so the sucky part is mostly lover. I still have to read the studies and digest them so I can create a synthesis of its essence to put into words, but that’s nowhere near as bad as research in my books.

And I’ve written four books!

Which reminds me, I am fairly bummed about not being able to do NaNoWriMo (you know, that thing where I write a book every November? 50,000 words in 30 days? Along with thousands of other lunatics around the world?) this year. It just wouldn’t be a smart move considering my being in school now. Part of my really wants to scream BANZAI and throw myself into it anyhow, come what may, but for now at least, I am going to resist the urge.

It might win yet.

Back to Psych. The first study I am doing my best to read and digest (hey, that rhymes) is the “seminal” research about the Stroop Effect, done by some guy coincidentally named Stroop. What are the odds?

The Stroop Effect describes the way a visual conflict between a color word and the color it’s printed in can make naming said colors far, far more difficult. I have done the Stroop test a number of times myself and it is, indeed, very difficult. Because reading is something we do without conscious thought, it is very hard to ignore the text and say the actual color. A fair bit of on-the-fly correction is needed, and that is very expensive in terms of cognition.

If you want to try that out for yourself (it’s quite interesting and amusing), you can try it out here. Harder than you thought, right?

The problem I am having reading this particular study is that it doesn’t follow the tightly organized rules that more modern studies do. For one thing, there’s no abstract, which is the part of the study that gives a general overview of the study : what was being tested, what was the methodology, results, conclusions, and so on.

So basically, the meat of the thing.

And I really like that, I am very much a general-to-specific kind of thinker, and so it is a great help to understanding the study if I get the big picture first then fit the rest of it into the big picture’s structure.

It’s just how this particular model of brain I have works. I have a much harder time going from the details to the big picture. To me, that’s like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle when you lost the top of the box and therefore have no idea what the damned thing is supposed to look like in the end.

No thank you.

Still, I know I will prevail. I just have to slow myself down long enough to read the thing slowly and thoroughly instead of just vacuuming up information like I usually do.

For someone with a decided left-brain bias, I learn very holistically. I guess that’s what makes me a genius.

Today’s been a normalish day. Went to Ideology and Politics. There was part of the class where we were suppose to look up a bunch of definitions in our textbooks. I don’t have a textbook. So I just kind of froze up inside.

That happens to me a lot. The whole freezing up thing.

The teacher said that if we didn’t have a textbook, we should partner up with someone. And that girl with the sweet smile was all by herself. I am sure she would have been happy to share with me. But I couldn’t do it. Too big a leap for a frozen man.

The weirdest thing about it is that at the time, my mins shifted to a feeling like I had too much stubborn pride to admit I needed a book. Must be my Scottish blood waking up. I felt my jaw set and my chin stick out and everything!

That…. is very unlike me. And the first urge is, of course, to therefore quash it. But I am choosing not to do that because I think it is actually a good sign. A sign that my mind is finally developing some ego defenses to counter the toxicity of my mental environment. Something to fight against the decay and disintegration of my self-worth.

So while the stubborn pride reaction was by no means logical, sensible, or even sane, I think it heralds some very necessary change in me, and that’s a good thing.

My id needs a way, way bigger cage. I have asked other people “Would you rather be right, or happy?” in order to highlight the damage that can be done when people maintain a position simply because if they changed their minds it would mean the other person, whom they are mad at, was “right”.

But now I ask it of myself : Would I rather have the right answer, or be happy? I have said that there’s nothing in my head worth keeping if it gets in the way of my becoming a healthier, happier person. Everything can go.

But what if one of the things holding me back , maybe even the biggest thing, is my fanatical devotion to the truth?

Maybe everyone needs a certain level of BS in their souls in order to protect themselves from the harsher edges of reality. Maybe I have been destroying myself from the inside by ruthlessly rooting out delusion and illusion and illogic. Maybe the only way to be a happy healthy person is to leave yourself lots of room to believe whatever you need to believe in order to remain whole. Maybe the truth is not always the best thing to believe.

The question is, if all that is true, am I capable of changing? How do you stop killing yourself with the truth?

I don’t know. But I know it starts with cutting myself a lot more slack when it comes to the truth.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.