Anne, Catherine, Dave… you should probably skip this one.

Just got out of therapy. Some important stuff came up.

I think that my siblings and I are very much products of how our mother raised us, and as a result we are all very bright…. but we don’t know how to express emotion.

We could only express ourselves intellectually. And no big surprise, we all ended up struggling with depression and/or anxiety. Deep down, we all knew that expressing negative emotions would upset our mother, and because she raised us, it would upset the other siblings too. We had one primary example of expression unbridled emotion in our household, and that was Dad.

And he was a heck of a counterexample.

Contrasted to that was our very sweet mother who stimulated our minds marvelously, and of course, we wanted to please her, so we became her students. Her eager, shining students.

But I am pretty sure your mother is supposed to be more than a teacher to her kids.

And then there’s the fact that we all instinctively protect her. That’s the deep and unquestionable rule of the Bertrand kids. We all protect Mom without question or hesitation. My mother is shy and sensitive (like me) and so we all protect her from the harshness of the world because we love her. Even as I type this, the very thought of doing anything that might hurt or upset her makes me feel like I want to faint. That is something you simply Do Not Do.

But who do you go to when you are hurt when you can’t bring that to your mother for fear of hurting her? Being strong for your kids is part of parenting. Giving them a safe place where they can be vulnerable, where they can get their boo-boos kissed and their egos soothed is a vital part of parenting, and I don’t think any of us got that from either parent.

At least, not past a certain point. Possibly the point where Mom went back to work, I don’t know. I can remember my mom being there when I hurt myself when I was a wee little preschooler. I was a clumsy little thing with poor vision and an excess of enthusiasm… a deadly combo. And I remember running to her with my cuts and bruises,and getting comfort and nurturing then.

But at some point, that changed. She was simply not there for me. The others are older than me, and so maybe they got their nurturing (and guidance, and scolding) before she became emotionally drained, but at some point, the light went off, and I didn’t know how to find my way home any more.

I guess it takes a lot of things going your way for you to end up any mentally healthier than your parents.

And I was not equipped to make friends. So much of my life’s problems begin with that. I never learned to truly get along with others. I never learned to fit in. I never got the proper socialization. Where would I have gotten in? I had no friends at school or at home. My siblings and I were in different universes. At no point did I have a chance to learn proper social integration at a level larger than a family.

As a result, I was socially isolated. Granted, my intelligence played a part in that too. I wasn’t exactly into what the other kids my age were doing. I was a very strange child.

But I think if I had gone to kindergarten, I might have had a chance of learning to get along somehow anyway. I would at least learned than changing yourself to fit in with the group is not the world thing in the world. There is more to life than integrity.

And that is another thing therapy got me thinking about : integrity. What is integrity, anyhow? I think a workable definition of integrity would be that it is the internal strength and cohesion of one’s psyche. We maintain our integrity because we don’t want to weaken that structure. We don’t want that kind of pain.

Now for people with a normal level of social integration, a lot of that structural integrity comes from the social fabric in which they live. From the outside, this seems like maybe a bad idea, but they are the ones with healthy fulfilling lives, so it must work for the vast majority of humanity.

But if you are outside the social fabric, socially isolated, that’s not an option. Integrity is all you have. So you end up very heavily invested in your personal integrity and unwilling to compromise it for any reason, no matter what.

You might even end up feeling like you’re barely keeping your guts in with both hands.

That’s why people like me end up in such a bad state, and why we are so unwilling to let our identities become subsumed in a larger one.

To us, that is death, or damn close to it. it requires a level of trust that is hard to calculate. You’d have to trust that if you let go of some of that personal integrity, the mysterious and frightening force that keeps social integration going will pick up the slack and keep your insides inside.

That is why, I think, a lot of nerds become incredibly invested in a particular nerdly subculture. That subculture is the very first place where they feel that sense of security that comes from being part of a social group, and that is like ice cold water for someone wandering in the desert of social isolation.

So they, in their various ways, worship their social savior. Maybe that worship fastens itself to a figurehead, like George Lucas, Joss Whedon, or Gene Roddenberry. But make no mistake, what is truly being worshiped is the thing which pierced their social isolation and brought light and warmth to their lives.

Myself…. I am still looking.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The language of slugs would be sluggish, and that’s how I feel right now.

I am going to stay calm about it, though, and remind myself that I know such things blow over eventually. It’s just a matter of waiting for it to blow over.

I will probably need more sleep before it does, though.

After a long but comfortable hiatus, I am back to putting together my portfolio. It’s impressive. I have forty short stories in it. And most of them are pretty damned good, if I say so myself.

It says something about depression that I keep having to remind myself that I might actually be good at this whole writing thing. If you asked me, I would say I was pretty good. But like I have said many times before, there’s a big difference between knowing the right answer and actually believing it.

And just like that, we are back to my problem with psychologically integrating my high IQ and whatnot. All I can say is that I am working on it. There are times when I feel like I am very smart and talented, and those periods are lasting a little longer every day.

The problem is that if I truly believed in myself like that, I would have to end up a great deal more egotistical. There’s just no way around it. Every bit of social and genetic programming I have tells me that if you are a highly intelligent and talented person, you should have a big ego. You should go around feeling like you are better than other people.

And I don’t like that. I am egalitarian to the core. So right now, I am trying to dream up a version of myself that is self-confident and who believes in himself, but also remembers that in many ways he is a goofy and clueless person and therefore should not get too carried away.

I am still in the unstable beginning of that process and it’s rough going. It makes me feel very unstable, and I hate that. But I have been a stable nothing for a long time.

There is no change without instability. To jump even the smallest of gaps, there has to be a moment when you don’t have both feet on the ground. And even that is a leap of faith.

Faith. That’s a whole kettle of fish itself. Maybe what people really get out of religion is the ability to have faith… to believe without need of proof. To believe first, before the question is even asked.

And sure, it’s easy for us intellectual atheist types to roll our eyes when that kind of belief causes people to bury their heads in the sand and deny evidence in order to preserve belief. But what else does that faith do for the person? What is it they are really protecting?

Maybe we atheists are secretly jealous of the meaning, purpose, and security the faithful draw from their ability to have faith in life and in themselves.

Maybe we wish we could do that too.

The thing is, I don’t know if it is possible for me to acquire faith at the age of 42. It certainly isn’t possible to get it via rational means. You can’t reason yourself into faith. Faith is a priori to reason. By its very nature, faith is deeply emotional and involves parts of the psyche far deeper than the glimmer on the surface of the water that is reason.

Yup. Water imagery.

For someone like me, the acquisition of faith would probably require some kind of emotional crisis, whether from without or from within, that melts down and breaks open the shiny bright structures of reason and lets the true self emerge, and rebuild things in a way that better suits it.

It seems absurd that it would take something that severe to truly heal me. But this exoskeleton built of logic and knowledge and powered by intellect has kept me going over the years, but it’s still a cage. It’s still too small a space to allow for any serious personal growth.

And lately I have become acutely aware of this. I long for escape. I wish I could just shed my skin like a snake so I could make room for the real, adult, fully realized version of me. I know that there is a strong and healthy version of me inside me, straining to get out, longing to be free.

But the path out goes directly into the dark heart of the forest, far away from the bright cold light of the known and the knowable. And that means a leap of faith is needed.

Reason and knowledge, at least how I practice it, is contiguous. It all fits together like nth-dimensional LEGO, and there is a great comfort to that. It makes you feel like you are in control and in command and that your mental armor has no chinks in it. You grow accustomed to that kind of inner life, and if you are wounded and unstable like me, you become highly dependent on it.

To go outside it seems impossible, or at least, unthinkable. You can even convince yourself that nothing exists outside this tight, fast, glittering world of yours.

But that just leaves you puzzled by how so much of your life just doesn’t make sense. The deep forest of emotion still exists even if you deny it completely.

so I have to take that leap out of the contiguous body of my internal model of the world and enter the realm of deep, primal emotion that lies beneath the surface of the waves.

Who would I be if I didn’t have this enormous intellect, I ask myself. Surely there is more to me than an outsized brain. What’s the rest of me like? Who am I really?

Exactly who am I as a human being, naked before the world without my armor?

I am determined to find out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have no particular idea of what I want to talk about, so it’s time to just open a vein and let it flow.

Today was a very sleepy day. I slept from 3 am to 11 am, had lunch at noon, then slept from 12:30 pm to 4 pm. That’s like… almost 12 hours of sleep. Half a day. And I still feel sort of tired.

There might be nothing wrong with that. That’s what I am trying to teach myself. Maybe the only problem is that I can’t simply accept that maybe that is what my mind and body needs, and if I stop fighting myself over it, everything will simply sort itself out.

Nietzsche was described as a man constantly at war with himself, using drugs and diet to try to fight the illnesses which plague him, and he lived many years as a profoundly sick and weakly person because of it.

I learned that lesson as part of learning to control my Irritable Bowel Syndrome. You can’t win against IBS if you tackle it head first and try to wrestle it into submission. That only adds energy to the system and you end up feeling a hell of a lot worse. That’s not a battle you can win.

You have to take the opposite approach, and let things run their course. And learn to listen to your body. It will tell you when things are going awry, and only then do you have the chance to head trouble off at the pass and keep yourself out of agony.

I suppose it’s a form of serenity. If I were a more aggressive person by nature, I am sure my road to recovery would have been far rockier. But I eventually (it took around four years) learned not to freak out when I started to feel ill, and when the bad stuff came down, to just relax and ride it out.

Maybe that is how I should look at sleep too. There’s no point in being upset about sleeping a lot. Maybe I need that extra sleep time to catch up on my dreaming. Maybe my body needs that extra sleeping time to clean house after all the naughty foods I ate over Xmas made a mess of the place. Maybe the very process of recovery means that sometimes, I have to sleep a lot in order to give my mind the time to process some of the deep hurt that lies within my tortured psyche and thus disentangle my knotted mind a little further.

I am just full of metaphors tonight. Hope you nice people are keeping up.

I keep coming back to the idea that one should live one’s life like an old time sailor. A sailor does not control the winds or the waves or a tide. He only controls his sails and his rudder. And yet, the boat gets where it wants to go.

So by just exerting the amount of control he has at his command, the sailor can triumph. The sailor knows that by adjusting to the circumstances beyond his control, he can prevail. Even if the storms come and knock his boat way off course and it looks like this might just be the end, he knows that if he can weather the storm, he will be able to get right back on course when it’s over.

It’s a very deep metaphor for life, I think. If I do say so myself. You don’t control the world. You don’t control what life throws at you. You don’t control your final destiny.

All you can do is steer.

But as it is when we drive, steering is enough to get us where we want to go.

Think about it. No driver controls the roads or the traffic. At any moment, any driver might have to adjust to sudden changes in circumstances. Even in city traffic, most of the time drivers have no choice what to do between intersections. Get on the highway and you have even fewer choices.

And yet billions of people get where they want to go every second of every day with those limited choices.

So life is a lot less like the individualistic ideal of self-made destiny and a lot more like a series of choices. You can’t always control the choices you have. But you always control what decisions you make.

But I am repeating myself. You get the general idea.

Other than sleepiness, today has been fine. Quiet and calm, like usual. That;s both the way I like and the way I really, really don’t. I look forward to the new semester, when my life will feel purposeful again.

I am really concentrating on my two word New Year’s resolution : stay busy! I am going to teach myself to develop little projects and goals until I am in a position where I have always something to do. That doesn’t mean I have to be a non stop dynamo of productivity. It just means that I have to look for ways to express the energy within myself until I am comfortably spent.

And that means clearing my mind of a lot of counterproductive ideas and poisonous fears. I have to stop listening to the part of me that always wants to run and hide from the world, and treats absolutely any increase in “exposure” to the world to be terrifying insanity.

Hiding is not safety, it’s death. The demons inside me are far deadlier than the terrors without. They just fool me into siding with them because they are so familiar.

And in that new semester, I am going to have Thursdays and Fridays off, and I will have to deal with that. Last semester, I had a class every day of the week. Spiffy. But I am not so lucky this time.

So I will have an extra two days a week to fill with… something. Video games and the Internet are not enough to keep my soul alive. I need more.

I need to stay busy!

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.

Title by the Pet Shop Boys.

I’ve been left to my own devices a lot lately. And I can’t say my devices are all that good. They never have been. I know how to survive on my own, but I don’t know how to actually enjoy life.

A lot of my basic emotional functions are just plain broken.

But that’s because I have a lot of unmet needs. I need more meaning in my life – things to make me feel like my life has some kind of purposes and that I am not just treading water till I die.

And I need romance. I need a man.

I need someone in my life I can connect with and cherish and adore. I have so much love to give the right man. The husband to my wife-ish nature. The masculine principle to my more feminine maleness.

I could be such a good wife to the right man. I would actually be more womanly than a lot of women, in the old fashioned traditional sense. I would be warm, affectionate, gentle, supportive, soft, soothing, and perfectly willing to be there when he comes home from work with his slippers, his pipe, and his martini.

I would, in fact, really enjoy that.

And my secret hope is that there is some gay man out there who longs for someone soft and gentle and supportive and nurturing but doesn’t feel like he can get someone like that because he’s not into women.

I would enjoy proving him wrong.

I would not, of course, be signing up to be his servant or his slave. Proper respect would have to be maintained. There would be a strong possibility that he would start to look down on me for my lack of male virtue and my willingness to play the “female” role.

And then I would have to reminds him, as women have done since the dawn of humanity, that he needs me and that I am his partner, not his bitch.

Well, most of the time, anyhow.

The problem, of course, is how to meet men when you have social anxiety. I have tried dating sites and have never had any success. On paper, they seem like the ideal method for the receptive male. Set up a profile and then just wait for suitors to contact you.

But they don’t. Probably because I don’t play the game. I don’t put up a generic-ish profile and then let people know how weird I am in bits and pieces, over time.

Even when I keep it short, I fill it with my own unique personality. For me, this is the most natural thing to do. I am a wizard of words and use said words to express who I am. So my profiles tend to be express my vibrant, wacky, intellectual ways.

That’s probably a mistake.

In the past I have told myself that this approach was about being genuine to myself and that if someone couldn’t handle the way I come across in my profile, they probably couldn’t handle me in the real world either. So I was just filtering the wrong people out… right?

But now I am not so sure. Maybe what I am really doing is sabotaging myself. I wouldn’t put it past my social anxiety to work behind the scenes to make sure I never actually have to face someone being into me.

Just thinking about having to get together with someone for a date scares the bejesus out of me.

So maybe I have been shooting myself in the foot and telling myself it was just being true to my foot-shooting nature. I don’t know. Am I really so sure that if they can’t instantly handle me at maximum intensity that there’s no chance for the relationship? It has to be zero to sixty in 0.1 seconds?

There’s nothing wrong with letting people get used to you. People don’t usual get me at first. There has to be an adjustment period where I dial in their frequency and they attune to mine. I kind of have to educate my audience, so to speak.

I guess that’s true of a lot of people. But I pump out a lot of wattage. I suppose there is nothing wrong with starting at relatively normal and then turning the dial up slowly.

Getting over my doubts about myself would be a big help too. I spent a lot of time thinking I was a horrible hideous disgusting lump of unfuckable unlovable pig-fat, human poison that causes pain to all just by existing, and that is not an easy thing to get over.

I am getting there, though. There are times (like earlier in this blog entry) that I can see myself as a fabulous person with a lot to offer the right guy. Sure, I am fat, but that’s hardly an insurmountable obstacle. Somewhere out there, there is a guy who would love to have a big fat round man-wife to come home to every night. Someone funny and cuddly and highly intelligent.

Hmmm. That’s another potential barrier, my shiny shiny big IQ. I suppose it could intimidate people. But I am constitutionally unable to act like I am dumber than I am. That is one of the things that a potential mate would just have to get used to about me. I am crazy freaking smart. I don’t deliberately try to make others feel stupid, but it happens anyway.

Because I do like to show off how bright I am.

And it’s part of my exuberant nature. My highest level of self expression has me shining as hard as I can, and that can intimidate others, or make them feel like I am massively full of myself (maybe) and think that everyone else is stupid (no) and worthless (NO!).

That strikes me as the sort of thing that would influence how I deal with people across the scale.

But I will not hide my light under a bushel. Fuck that.

The world’s just going to have to learn to deal with me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of my Xmas gifts this year was a DVD box set of the “lost episodes” of the Carol Burnett Show. We just watched the first of the 18 episodes. I am awash with nostalgia.

That show, plus the Muppet Show, formed the very foundation of who I am. The warmth, wackiness, and wit of those shows became the basis of what I considered good television. Both shows had a way of making you feel like you were part of the family.

And that’s exactly the kind of show I want to make some day. The kind of show that can make people not just feel good, but feel better. That’s the power of television.

Especially, of course, if you’re raised by it.

It has been a sort of productive day. I paid my tuition for the coming semester from the money from the student loan for last semester. That was important to me, because I felt like I have to prove to Kwantlen that I am not some chronic deadbeat. The previous problems will not be repeated. I am on top of things now. They can trust me.

I also paid Tila back the $400 she loaned me. That felt good too. I don’t like owing money. I am always eager to settle up. I don’t like there to be strain on my relationships with people.

Which made it doubly frustrating when I couldn’t do a transfer to pay back Joe the $350 I owe him. I thought I could just do it as a bill payment to his account at Coast Capital. I mean, I bank at Vancity. It’s a credit union. So is Coast Capital. I thought it would be no problem.

But no, the moment I tried to transfer the money to Joe’s account, the bill paying system stopped working. I tried over and over and nope, no dice.

And that got the paranoia flowing, and I started to wonder if there is, in fact, a fierce and blood rivalry between Coast Capital and Vancity, and they deliberately sabotaged their systems to make it impossible for money to flow between them.

Of course, that’s crazy. And highly unlikely. But it’s how my mind works.

Feels good to be Getting Things Done. I still have a long ways to go. For one, I still have no idea if I an supposed to be applying for a second student loan right now or not. I also don’t know if I have messed with the system’s tiny dinosaur brain by paying next semester’s tuition without said student loan.

But the worse part is looking for scholarships that I can apply for. Kwantlen has a list on their website, and it’s quite thorough, but I can’t figure out how to find the stuff that might apply to me.

So all I can do is go through the entire list and read about dozens of scholarships for things like business administration and marketing and entrepreneurship and welding and even for being a goddamned ferrier^[1], but nothing for a sad lil artsy type like me.

There has to be a better way to find these things.

I tried to fill out the generic scholarship application form online, but it wanted information I don’t have yet, like how much money I expect to have coming in from scholarship.

If I knew that, I wouldn’t be bloody applying, would I?

I will try again, though. If they ask me for stuff I don’t know, I will just make a guess. I am just worried that the fact that I already paid for next semester will make me ineligible for all scholarships.

Because, you know, technically, I don’t actually need one any more. But goddamn it, I just want to do things right for once in my life, and part of that is trying to get scholarship money.

It’s a matter of principle. And cash. Mostly cash.

Plus I still have to buy my books for the next semester. Looks like they are going to run me around $300-$350 total. Ick. But I am fresh out of excuses not to buy them, so but them I shall.

But I will try to get them used, and thus at least partially resist the textbook mafia.

By my calculations, by the time I pay back Joe and pay for books, I will have maybe $50 left. That’s fine. I will spend that on school supplies and then I will be set.

And honestly, my main school supplies will be printer paper, printer ink, and fresh paper for my binders, the kind with reinforced holes.

Oh, and some really dark pencils. I used mostly pens last semester, but pens have a nasty habit of exploding in my pocket. I guess I am just a hot blooded dude. Ergo, I want to switch to pencils, but my eyes are not what they used to be so I need something that makes a good distinct dark mark.

There must be extra dark pencils out there somewhere.

Last night I had dinner with Joe’s family, which was pleasant and enjoyable as usual. And I am happy to say I did not have a single panic attack while I was there.

Normally I have one when I get there, and then a few over the space of the evening. I am just not used to socializing like that. But this year, I was able to remind myself that these are nice people and I always have a good time, and these peole like me and I like them, so what’s to worry about?

Admittedly, the three glasses of champagne probably helped a lot. Plus having stimulating intellectual conversation with Joe and his sister helped disperse my excess mental energy.

I’m a high strung, neurotic guy. I have to learn to accept that. And then work on finding things to absorb all that nervous mental energy so I can be calm and content.

Stay busy. That’s my motto for the new year.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Merry Xmas, all you nice people! Now on to the obsessive introspection.

I’ve been thinking about how my mind is so good at punishing me for very minor things that the whole process happens with the swiftness and severity of the drop of a guillotine’s blade.

I’ve talked about this before. I make some minor mistake – click the wrong icon and accidentally bring up the wrong program, I can’t find the book I am reading, I stand up the wrong way and my busted knee hurts – and this whole cycle of shock, dear, and self-loathing happens in the twinkle of an eye and suddenly my mood has taken a big hit over something extremely unimportant.

It’s not hard to imagine why. I have been doing this for so long that the brain pathways are very strong. It’s a way of taking out some of my latent anger and frustration on myself (never a good idea), and this way, my depression maintains itself.

Even when I am happy, there is a part of me that isn’t happy, because happiness is so weird for me that when it ends, that part of me is like, phew! That was awful.

Awful because it was different from the usual status quo mood of neutral-depressed that I have lived in for so much of my life.

Sad to think unhappiness can become a habit, isn’t it? Even sadder to think it can feel like… home.

So the whole thing happens so fast that I don’t feel like I can stop it cognitively. At least, not by the straightforward “sense it happening and call time out to examine it” method I have used with other thing like this before. And it happens so frequently that it must be the primary cause of my low self esteem.

So I need to either block the blade, or toughen the target, or both.

I do what I can now to ameliorate the effects of the blade, but that always comes after it has done its damage to me, and therefore there is only so much I can do. I tell myself “No, wait, that was just the same kind of dumb mistake anyone could make” but I can’t make myself truly believe it. That part of me that likes it when I stay depressed (and hence, in a perverse way, “safe”) sees to that.

God I am sleepy. But : words first!

Clearly, I need to tackle this problem with something more sophisticated than cognitive capture. This probably requires something that isn’t cognitive at all, and hence outside my usual comfort zone.

Yesterday, I was telling Doctor Costin about how I felt trapped in my reason-bound life. That I have come to the conclusion that the one thing a life constrained by logic, reason, and facts cannot provide is transcendence. One cannot transcend the self in a world without magic or religion. By hewing fast to strictly transpersonal truth, one denies oneself permission to invent the cure needed for what ails their soul. And the souls suffers greatly for it.

That’s what I think the primary religious experience is : a moment when your imagination conceives of and believes something that repairs the damage. That can be anything from a feeling of communion with Christ when you are at church to someone developing a strong belief in having been abducted by aliens, but the end result is the same : the person imagines and believes something which fills in the gaps in life for them and makes them feel both whole and part of something bigger than themselves.

And while science can, in a sense, provide you with all kinds of ways you are part of something greater than oneself – we are, after all, made of stuff born in the heart of a dying star in a universe so vast that we can scarcely comprehend it and part of a long chain of life spanning back to the first life on Earth – that does not actually fill the requirement of feeling like you are part of something greater than yourself because there is no human factor.

We need to feel part of something greater than ourselves because that is meant to drive us to work together in a common endeavour. You can’t get that from astrophysics alone.

The only way a reason-bound person can connect with something greater than themselves is to believe in something entirely secular like a cause or an organization. I’m not sure I can do that yet… I am too mistrusting. It is really hard for me to join anything that I didn’t create and control.

It is very hard to find transcendence when you are incapable of letting your identity dissolve into a group identity. On a very deep animal level, I vigorously resist anything that tries to encroach upon my identity. I resist it like it is trying to kill me.

That’s how scared it can make me. It’s not an easy thing to think about. I guess I just don’t trust people on a really deep level. Or maybe it is the long term effect of isolation. You spend so much time excluded from everything that any change in that seems like a dreadful invasion.

I can’t let people in… then I will get hurt! And yet, I really long for connection with others. I have been so alone in my cold little world for so long that I dream of finding someone I feel I can trust enough to truly relax around them.

That kind of deep trust would be an enormous spiritual step forward for me. There is a part of me that is still the little boy who was afraid of his classmates and tried to avoid them whenever he could. The boy who couldn’t make friends with he people who tried to make friends with him because he was all frozen inside, and couldn’t thaw out enough to let friendship change him.

Warm on the outside, winter on the inside, that’s me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Straight men, I mean. It’s different for us fags. Kinda.

Anyhow, the thing women should know about men is that when it seems like all they want is sex, a lot of the time what they really want is intimacy. They want the act, sure, but their real goal, without them knowing it, is the quiet and the cuddles after.

And above all, what they want is a woman’s approval. They want a woman to say “Yes, you ARE good enough for me” and this need is so strong that the fact that they might be paying that woman for sex does not in any way dilute it.

Prostitutes will tell you that a lot of their clients make like what they want is sex, but end up just talking to the sex worker instead. That’s because it’s the intimacy they crave, and the approval. Simply talking to a sympathetic and willing woman can do wonders for a man’s emotional well-being, and that is far more important than sexual release. ^[1]

Men can get sexual release by themselves. It’s all the rest of it that they really crave.

And why are things like this? Because men aren’t supposed to crave intimacy and approval. It’s just plain not allowed. Among acceptable male emotions to express, lust is the most acceptable. So all their other needs are funneled into lust.

In the male culture of North America, even the desire to settle down and get married is penalized. Can you imagine a bunch of bro type males talking about how much they love to cuddle. Or how they need a woman’s approval in order to feel like they are a man. Or about how sad and lonely they get sometimes.

So it all gets tied into lust. That guy bragging about what he did in bed with some woman might really be saying “A woman said yes to me, and that makes me a valid male!”. The guy who cracks sexist jokes all the time might be expressing his deep frustration with lack of female approval the only way he knows how. The man who “suddenly turn into a monster” during a date might just be so desperately lonely that it overrides their higher faculties leaving their id in charge.

And they probably hate themselves afterward.

This all stems from the fact that these deep emotional needs often operates well below the conscious level. Men are not encouraged to introspect, and that means men are often a mystery to themselves. They do things without knowing why, and often conclude that there must be something wrong and evil about themselves because they misbehave with women.

This includes the things men do to try to control women. Like I have said before, men who feel the need to dominate, punish, and control women are men who are terrified of women’s power to do emotional harm to them, and therefore feel like they only can be “safe” around a woman if she is violently and visibly suppressed.

Therefore I think that one of the best, if not THE best, weapon against violence against women is the emotional empowerment of men. If male culture becomes more open and accepting of nonsexual desires for women, men will no longer have to try to get all their emotional needs satisfied via sex, and therefore would not become tortured souls who can’t understand why they aren’t happy.

Too many of them conclude it must be something wrong with women.

This conflict between men’s emotions and what it is acceptable for them to express helps explain why the “friend zone” is so hated by men. To a man, pursuing a woman all the way to the point of sex and then being told the woman only wants to be friends seems like a cruel trick, something like a bully holding out something you really want then pulling away at the last second saying “Psych!”.

As though women were saying “You’re good enough…. good enough… good enough… LOL NOPE.”

Obviously, this is crazy, and not what the woman is thinking at all. But the current setup produces men for whom sex with a woman is the only form of approval they are allowed to seek. So saying “but hey, you still get a friend! Isn’t that almost as good?” is meaningless. It’s like telling someone that sure, they lost the million dollar first prize, but the second prize of a coupon from the Keg is almost as good!

No it isn’t. It really, really isn’t.

And I think women are better off learning to accept this. Sure, when you are a teenage girl trying to figure out this exciting and dangerous new territory of desire for boys, you can be forgiven if you keep “making friends” with guys who seem really nice then suddenly “get weird and gross” by expressing sexual interest in them, but by the time you are out of college, you should be wise enough to realize that men are going to pursue them with sex on their minds and that’s fine. That’s normal. Imagine how you would feel if they stopped wanting you that way entirely.

And if a man makes a pass at you and you tell him that you just want to be friends, and he says he’s cool with that, that man definitely still wants to have sex with you. All you have done is put him in a holding pattern. He agreed to the friends thing because he didn’t want to lose access to you. But deep down, no matter what he says, he still wants to fuck you.

Well I guess that’s my wisdom bomb for today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Nope, this isn’t fiction. Sounds like one of my short story titles, though, doesn’t it?

Been rolling in the grey lately. Hanging around naked, sleeping a lot, letting the days go by.

And my bed-seeking urge is off the charts. It was really hard for me to get out of bed today. My bed has turned into a gravity well again, and it takes a lot of emotional thrust to escape it.

And I have been looking at the clock when I wake up from a nap and if it’s close to a meal time, I feel like I have won something.

The signs are clear. I am depressed.

But I am not going to beat myself up over it. This is a diagnosis, not a judgment. Getting depressed over being depressed is extremely counterproductive. What matters is the solution.

First, though, one must define the problem precisely. The more clearly one defines a problem, the better the quality of the cure.

The thing is, my mood is not terrible. I haven’t had deep feelings of hopelessness, or that there was no point to anything. Anhedonia is low. So the physical depression is not, as of yet, resulted in emotional depression on a large scale.

I think that’s because the coming of Xmas is providing a little structure to my life that I desperately need when school is not doing the job. Having something to look forward to has a very strong effect on my mood, as does a feeling of financial security. I have both right now.

Admittedly, if I had realized this was a five week month, I might not have ordered the KFC^[1] I ordered last Saturday night. But meh. As it stands now, I have no more planned spending before next Wednesday, so the $350 or so I have left will have to cover 4 weeks at $87.50 a week.

No prob. I get get by on that no problem. And January is a GST cheque month, so that will supplement things.

My planned Xmas Eve at Riverport will be a little expensive…. probably something like $50, unless the restaurant I go to has a “dinner and a movie” deal or something. But that won’t matter too much. I will be able to work around it. Some things are worth investing in, and not feeling dangerously lonely on Xmas eve is one of them.

It’s weird that I will be going to therapy on Xmas Eve. My psychiatrist is Jewish, so it’s just another day for him and his people, but it’s a little strange for me. I will be going to therapy, coming home, then something like three or four hours later, heading off to Riverport by bus.

Riverport is not that far from my therapist’s office, come to think of it. Maybe I will do the movie first.

At any rate, I got plans. See the Star Wars movie, have a nice dinner, come home by bus, go to bed, get up, wait for Joe to come pick me up for Xmas dinner with his family.

Not bad for a single dude with no family nearby.

Looks like I will be eating at the Old Spaghetti Factory out there at Riverport. Other times I have eaten out there, I ate at this decent little brew pup called something like Old River Brew Pub or something. But when I went to look up restaurants at Riverport I came across some very negative reviews of the place and so I am thinking Old Spaghetti Factory sounds like a safer bet.

Their food isn’t impressive, but it’s good.

Anyhow, back to my twilit world. I have decided that the best way to address the problem is to simply remove expectations from the equation. Maybe I had ideas of what I “should” do over the Winter Break and I am not really doing any of them, but the worm has turned on those expectations and they have become poisonous. They have become something to beat myself up over and thus become something that drives me to hide from the world with bed and naps and distractions.

So, whatever. My only obligations are to do my words for you people every day and to finally get around to doing a LOC for Felicity. Next semester will start no matter what, I don’t have to invest any more energy in that to keep it going. It is perfectly fine if all I do is nap and blog and play video games for the whole two weeks. If I am to do more, it will have to be because of a naturally and organically occurring desire, not some artificial pressure from “above” about what I “should” be doing.

Having trouble focusing. My interior mental processes must be trying to usurp more mental resources than I can spare while consciously focusing on what I am doing. I just spaced out for thirty seconds in the middle of writing about how much trouble I was having focusing.

That’s some of that irony stuff I have heard so much about.

Oh well, my brain will get its way when I am done blogging. Then I will just unplug and let my conscious mind go slack so those busy interior processes can have the place to themselves for a while.

In other words, I will “zero out”, as I like to call it. It’s not sleep, but it’s a state of being totally unaware of your environment and time passing subjectively fast and sometimes I dream, so it is a lot like sleep. But when I return to reality, I don’t feel like I have slept.

More like I was lost in thought for a while. Which I was, in a sense.

So anyhow, whatever happens between now and Thursday is cool. May I will get back to compiling my portfolio, and maybe I won’t. Maybe I will send stuff out to markets, and maybe I won’t.

It’s all cool.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.