This is a topic I have brushed up against a few times before. But for whatever reason, I have been thinking more supervillain-like thoughts lately(I dunno, maybe my reptile brain is waking up, or I am just feeling my oats after finishing a semester), so I thought I would try to work it out by writing

The main thing is that I have a diabolical mind.

Part of that is intelligence, of course. It’s not easy to be diabolical if you’re stupid^[1]. But intelligence alone does not give one a diabolical mind. There are plenty of very bright people in the world who go through life with minds as simple and honest as a fresh dug beet.

No, to have a truly diabolical mind, a supervillain mind, it takes a potent combination of intelligence, psychological harm, rage, and cowardice.

The psychological damage is crucial because only a broken mind becomes a twisted mind. Some bit of psychological harm has to be there in order to prevent the normal, healthy, productive expression of emotion that leads to a well balanced psyche with no deep, obsessive needs.

The rage may well come from this. The truth is that for people with a broken mind, everyday life is full of pain. This alone, regardless of life events, can lead to a deep seated rage against a world that seems intent on making you suffer.

But why doesn’t the diabolical person deal with this rage openly? Because of the cowardice. Winners don’t have diabolical minds. They don’t need them. Their lives are simple straight roads.

But for the omega of the pack, life is not so simple. To them, conflict equals loss. They are too scared to fight anyone head to head. That’s why they come up with plans.

Plans (schemes, whatever) allow the tension between rage and cowardice to be resolved. A well executed plan circumvents the need for conflict at all. The fight is over before the object of your wrath even knows it began. Cowardice funnels the rage through the intelligence, and what comes out are schemes.

And it is this need to find indirect solutions that makes a mind diabolical. The rage is the driving force, pushing the mind into weird little nooks and crannies. It propels the mind into places other minds wouldn’t go. It makes you devious.

And deviousness is the primary attribute of a diabolical mind. It is the difference between youth and vigor, and old age and treachery. It is deviousness that solves the conflict between rage and cowardice. The diabolical person soothes their wounded pride when someone humiliates them by telling itself that it will get even with them… someday.

And then, the planning begins.

These plans only rise to the level of being truly diabolical, though, when they demonstrate a level of intelligence and anticipation that the average person would find downright terrifying. As I have said before, intelligence is the most frightening advantage that one person can have over another.

Therefore, the truly diabolical (and hence most frightening) plans are the ones that demonstrate that, to the diabolical person, normal people’s actions are as simple and predictable as the chiming of a clock.

It scares people because it’s not only a demonstration of a kind of power they can’t attain or even understand, it also their sense of their own free will.

There’s more things that go into the diabolical mind. Careful observation of how things work is one necessary ingredient. Another is a certain brand of hardcore pragmatism. A third is a willingness to think any thought and go anyplace, however dark, in order to find solutions.

I, myself, am possessed of such a mind. I have a diabolical mind, but I am not a diabolical person. Usually, it doesn’t go any further than the plan with me. I deal with whatever happens by making the plan and amusing myself with it, then filing it away in my mind where I will never look at it again.

And even that doesn’t happen very often. I think that is because my travails of life have been a matter of absences, not battles lost. I have had very little interpersonal conflict in my life. Sure, I was bullied, and for a time I really hated my bullies.

But now I don’t care. Revenge against them would be ludicrous and pathetic. We were children. None of us knew what the hell we were doing or why.

So while I am completely capable of conceiving and refining a plan so devious and cunning it would have the appearance of magic, I honestly don’t have the desire to do it.

In fact, that is a path I strenuously avoid. I have come face to face with that potential version of me many times in my life, and every single time I have rejected it. I don’t want to go that way. That road can only need to malice, hate, and insanity.

And here I am again, looking it in the face. It is not without its appeal. In the short term, it addresses feelings of powerlessness and failure by replacing them with a feeling of power and superiority. They think they are better than me, but it is I who are better than them!

But even that seems sad and petty to me. That’s not the path to healing. That’s the road to Hell.

Even so, I can see why people don’t know how to deal with me, beside my severe lack of socialization. On one level I give out the power signal of my intelligence. On the other hand, I am a gentle and friendly soul who doesn’t bear ill will towards people and therefore gives off submissive/receptive signals on another level. Plus, of course, I am very large, and that’s another alpha-like signal. But I’m harmless.

It’s like being a very polite and gentle tiger. Sure, in time, people might learn you are as harmless as a kitten. But at first, they are going to be very confused.

Nothing I can do about that, I suppose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, waiting for a table  at my favorite  White Spot.

I knew this would be the case because I am here at 1:13, and the lunch rush is in full swing. Good thing I have you nice people to keep me company.

Did my final final exam today. It was pretty tough because it was completely cumulative.  There were questions from every singke section we covered. Plus it was ninety questions long, which is a lot.

But whatever,  it is done. I was, of course, the first one done. For better (usually) and for worse (occasionally),  I make up my mind quickly in these sorts of situations and don’t look back. A multiple choice exam is ideal for my kind of mind. It takes me mere seconds to figure out my answer and fill in the little circle. Then I am on to the next.

The exam was scheduled for three hours. I did it in half an hour.  I mean, 180 minutes for 90 questions? Thats two minutes a question. Who takes two minutes to pick between four potential answers?

Afterwards, I went to the bank to the cash La Cheque. At first, the guy said “We are going to have to put this check on hold for a week, is that okay?”

This caught me so off guard that I actually sputtered. I think that is the first time I have ever done that. I told him that, um, no, that was not going to be okay, and that last time there had been no problem.

Eventually everything got sorted out. I mean, I could see their point if it was a personal check drawn from another institution. But this was a government cheque. They don’t come any more solid than that.

They, of course, have the Xmas music playing here in White Spot. As always, my objection to omnipresent Xmas music is not that I don’t like Xmas music, it is that I don’t like BAD Xmas music. And there is only so much of the good stuff in the world. The longer I am exposed to the usual Xmas mix, the more likely I am to have to endure a stinker.

Like earlier, I had to sit through some crooner doing the seemingly impossible by making Jingle Bells sound sleazy and gross.

I am serious.I started feeling weird about all the kids in the restaurant hearing this slimeball. Don’t get in his “sleigh”, kiddies!

WTF? “My Favorite Things?” That’s not an Xmas song! And it sounds really weird being sung by a baritone crooner.

Not that there is anything  wrong with big burly manly men being into kittens and mittens and bright colored packages tied up with string. On the right guy, it could be downright sexy.

Nothing quite as sexy as a powerful positive alpha displaying nurturing behaviors. That is the full male package right there. Shows he will protect you And help raise the kids. Hubba Hubba.

Oh well, I have the cure for bad Xmas music back home : good Xmas music! Via my mp3 collection. I have great stuff in there, including stuff from A Very Special Christmas, an album of Xmas songs done way back in the Eighties by some popular artists of the Eighties and a lot of them are very good.

So you have stuff from Sting, The Pointer Sisters, Run DMC, U2, Maddona, Annie Lennox, and many more. Most of the time, when someone says “It’s an Xmas album with songs from today’s top pop stars!”, I would expect it to suck like the vacuum of space. But they got it right that time.

Here’s the Annie Lennox contribution. She is so cool.

(—)

Home now. Looks like I will be doing this whole entry via my tablet because my website is still messed up. The problem with that is that I don’t have a wordcount display on the tablet so I have no idea if I will do all my words tonight.

Last night, I blogged to a text file, in case you were wondering.

I am glad that I have officially finished Semester One of college. Feels good. But I don’t feel truly relaxed yet. Maybe that is just not in the cards for me, I don’t know. I would love to be able to relax and actually treat this time as a vacation, but I have already had a million vacations in my life. And I am goddamned sick of them. For me, work is the welcome relief.

Gonna have to start thinking about my Xmas Eve plans. I feel a lot stronger now than I have on previous years, but I still don’t necessarily want to be alone on Xmas Eve. Maybe this will be the year I finally go out and do something nice for myself that night, to celebrate.

Maybe I will take the bus out to Riverport, have a nice dinner, then go see the new Star Wars. I would still be alone, but I would be making myself feel good. And honestly, the main problem before has been my staggeringly intense social anxiety. It makes the usual suggestions people give to us lonely at Xmas types, like going to some bar event or helping out at the soup kitchen, nigh on useless.

For someone with my issues, going to a strange place full of strangers on a night when I am feeling especially emotionally vulnerable is just not in the cards. Not yet, anyways.

So Project Riverport it is. I just wish I had someone to cuddle up with after. Someone I can feel totally relaxed with because I trust them implicitly and their strength helps me feel whole. Someone strong and competent and caring who will appreciate someone kind, gentle, and affectionate.

Baby steps. Some day I will have a man, damn it.

Well I don’t know if I have made wordcount yet, but I am done. Time to lay down in the dark and think about stuff.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I don’t mean those cute little kitchen scales you can get at the dollar store.

It occurred to me as I was improvising a supper for myself tonight that there is a scale one can used to measure how much time and energy you are willing to invest in cooking at a particular point in time.

On one end, you have the true gourmet experience, where you carefully choose the ingredients, prepare them carefully, cook the meal slowly, and only then do you taste the fruits of all your loving labors.

On the other end, the one where most of us live, is the phenomenon I call SPTF, or Shortest Path To Food.

This path encompasses both time and effort. You want food and you don’t give a damn about how you get it or, sometimes, even what the hell it is. You just want to get to eating ASAP.

This is the sort of thing that leads to people eating pickle and mayonnaise sandwiches over a sink while drinking generic cola and finishing it all off with half a stale donut you forgot you had.

It it also what causes me to end up eating a sandwich, a soup bowl full of junk food, and a piece of fruit for most meals. And that is very sad.

Note that this scale measures perceived time and effort, not real time and effort. One might well be able to make a compelling logical argument that something tastier and more nutritious would involve exactly the same amount of time and effort, but that argument fails the SPTF effort test because included in the cost of this brilliant new thing is the time and mental energy it takes to learn it, and that can’t begin to compare with how easy it is to do something you have done a million times before.

I think a lot of the people pushing healthier alternatives miss that vital point. Generally, people consider their food options on a kind of auto-pilot and while our auto-pilot circuit is vital to our ability to get through the day, it is also very stupid and makes decisions based on emotion and need, not reason.

That is why I think that the only truly effective weapon in the battle for better public nutrition is tasty healthy snack foods. That way you can reach the very bottom of the scale, the person who does not want to cook at all and just wants to open a bag of something and eat it.

If you can reach that level of simple animal need, you can then reach higher up the tree, so to speak. Remember, the nutritionally deprived often don’t have the nutrition to even make solid decisions. People get off work and their brain does a much needed shutdown so they can recover from the days stresses and process everything that happened.

Sure, they would actually feel a whole lot better and be better at coping with everything if they ate better, but you have to get them on the path first.

That reminds me of my idea for the “Eat Everything” diet. The secret of the diet is simple. Subtract nothing from people’s diets. Telling them they can’t have what they want just makes them feel guilty for wanting them, and that only leads to abandoning the diet, because they get tired of feeling guilty and it is easier to modify one’s participation in a diet than it is to modify one’s basic needs and desires.

Instead of subtracting, add. Add nutritious foods to your diet. You can still have all of the other stuff that you want. All you are doing is adding some good things too.

It is literally an “eat more and weigh less” diet.

See, a lot of the problems with obesity actually come from nutritional deficits. Obese people are far more likely to have extremely unhealthy diets and this causes them to misidentify nutritional cravings as just hunger in general.

It’s shocking to think about, but maybe the reason someone eats and eats and is never truly satisfied is that they are eating the wrong things. Their body wants something in particular. They just don’t know how to really hear what it is telling them.

And what is keeping them from hearing? The natural biases of the human palate. Thanks to how we are wired, we will always get the maximum reward from things that are sweet, creamy, and salty.

And of course, when given the choice, all animals go for the highest reward food available.

Thus, over time, a lot of us gravitate towards unhealthy foods because they are the sweetest, creamiest, saltiest things around. Natural healthy foods can’t compete.

And so we, of course, end up eating a lot of the food that activates the hell out of the reward center of the brain. It’s the most popular form of self-medication in the world. Modern society takes a hell of a lot out of us, and we try to compensate with food.

For obese people, this tendency is exaggerated until it becomes their dominant coping mechanism. It is useless to tell them to eat properly when doing so would vastly decrease their reward level. The reward center of our brain is the only reason we do anything. Decrease reward, and depression sets in./

So to try to bring this back to what I was trying to talk about, the “Eat Everything” diet hacks that system by maintaining reward levels. True, there is still the hurdle of overcoming the aversion to eating anything that is not maximally rewarding, but that’s a much lower hurdle than trying to convince people they will be okay when they give up their dominant coping mechanism.

They would need to switch to another, equally powerful source of reward right away to have any chance of success, and only you have a team of highly skilled prostitutes on call, it’s not going to happen.

That’s why the future belongs to very tasty healthy snack foods. High reward AND high nutrition.

People are working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that’s it. My final final assignment is handed in, I took my Psych 1200 exam, and all that is left between me and freedom is my Psych 1100 exam on Friday.

After that, my Xmas season can truly begin, and I can fully relax and enjoy it knowing that I truly accomplished something : I finished five courses of education, and with good marks in all of them.

Although in one case, that good mark is only good relative to the class average.

speaking of that class, I had a very interesting thing happen to me right before the exam. The guy I sat next to for all of Psych 1200 ^[1], who was also in my Ideology and Politics class, asked me how well I did in I & P, and that happened to open up a whole discussion about how much the prof of that sucks.

So I’m not the only one who dislikes her.

Interestingly, he said that he took another course from the same prof last year, and she was fine. Didn’t stick out from the other profs at all. But this time, she was totally different.

He agreed with me that she didn’t know what it is like to be just starting in the subject, and that she never taught us to do the things she tested us on. He said that he had never had a course where he had to do a paper every two weeks. I dodged that bullet by… umm…. completely spacing on half of them.

I’d be fine with argumentative papers if I didn’t have to back up my opinion with facts. Make of that what you will. I just really don’t want to fit what I say into existing knowledge.

Fuck that. That’s for scholars, not thinkers. I think it and write it. Someone else can figure out where it goes in the existing body of knowledge.

I really don’t care.

And I don’t like dealing with unprocessed knowledge. Like I have said before, My mind automatically integrates information into a heavily optimized body of my OWN knowledge, but that takes time. And, due to my own sluggishness and procrastination, I kept ended up having to do these research type reports in a hurry, and that meant no time to absorb, digest, filter, and integrate the information I was dealing with.

What I should have done was start the project immediately so I can find the studies, read them slowly and carefully so I can absorb the dense information stream (rereading as necessary), then given myself time to process it all until my mind reduces it to a simple, easily operable set of facts.

Do that for all the research involved, and writing the damned thing would be a breeze. I’d be writing about things I already know. It would be not that different than writing without the research.

Something to keep in mind next semester. I mean, philosophy and creative writing are unlikely to require any research projects, but history and linguistics might.

I hope not, though.

Oh, and something magical happened while I was doing the exam. I got that amazingly good feeling I had once before during a Psych 1100 class. I felt relaxed, happy, and totally confident. And I was able to ride that wave all the way through the exam.

And speaking of that exam…. I finished first! I apologize for the following :

*dances around like a lunatic chanting ‘I finished first’ in a schoolyard singsong*

Ahem. Sorry, had to be done.

And of course, what I really want to know is how do I get that good feeling back? Now that I have two instances to compare, I can make more progress figuring that out.

In both cases, I was in a classroom at Kwantlen, fully engaged in what was going on, and hydrating regularly from my big 2L water bottle.

It can’t be the hydration alone, because I hydrate a lot at home too, and I never feel that good. And it can’t just be that the hydration was spaced evenly. I do that at home too.

So it must be the hydration plus another factor. The full engagement comes to mind. Somehow the hydration facilitated me moving into “The Zone” and being in “The Zone” is one of the happiest places a human being can be : fully activated and using all their energies in a relaxed but focused way.

So perhaps the key is for me to hydrate while doing something which fully engages me. Those things are hard to find, and I suspect there may be another factor, like recent exercise, at work.

Maybe that’s the formula. A little exercise to get my body into a moderately adrenal mode, then hydration and engagement, and voila, I feel amazingly good.

It would totally be worth it to feel like that again. The only other time I have felt that good was when I was coming off being on liquid Valium for an endoscopic procedure.

Maybe muscle relaxation is the key. I don’t know.

But I would love to feel that way all the time. It was amazing. I might become somewhat insufferable at first, as I felt totally confident and relaxed and it is honestly only crippling neurosis that holds back my potential for being a smug, cocky bastard in check most of the time.

But after I came back down to Earth, it would be great. All my creative potential, cleverness, and intellect without the burdens. I could do amazing things in this world if that were the case.

And I swear, I will get there some day. Lose the burdens, keep the good stuff, and ROCK THIS WORLD OUT.

I might not be there yet, but I know deep in my soul that I can be an amazing person who is both sweet and kind while also being gregarious, charming, and very impressive.

Some day, beloved readers. SOME DAY.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight’s the night I actually write that goddamned final paper for Psych 1200.

In fact, honestly, I would rather be writing it than writing a blog entry. But I have to do my words now so they are out of the way and I can concentrate fully on the paper without worrying about the bloggening.

Today’s saga of personal dumfuckery began when it came time for me to call the university to get my password reset. I had the number on the screen when working up to getting over my social anxiety issues re: phones, when suddenly the most amazing thing happened.

I remembered my password. Of…. course I did. I remembered it at the exact moment it would make absolutely no difference. None. Zip.

Oh well, it saved me a phone call.

This afternoon, I did all the preliminary work. I found my study and three related sources (one of them the DSM). I started the document and set it to the right margins and put the header in and figured out how to do line numbering and stuff.

But the dumfuckery was not over, as I freaked out and got all frustrated at not being able to figure out how to set the document to double-spacing. I Googled the problem, pored over menus, and got no closer to an answer. And the thing is, I knew I had figured it out for other documents. But now it was gone!

Nerp. It was right where it has always been, right where all the answers I Googled said it would be, and I had been too panicked and frustrated to see it.

I really am prone to freaking out. It’s disturbing. I think of myself as this mellow laid-back cool guy, but the reality is that I am high strung and ready to go off like a rocket at the drop of a hat, leaving reason and sensibility far, far behind.

Gotta work on that.

Anyhow, I have the opening paragraph, which will be the most difficult one, half-done. After that, it’s pretty much just a rephrasing/summarizing job. Read the study, summarize method and results and all that, not that big a deal.

So I am not sweating it too much. Once I get the intro done (which is where I will in-text cite my sources), I should be able to knock of something approaching a decent paper before midnight.

Technically, I have until I have to leave for the exam at around 2:30 pm to do it (we pass it in at the exam) to do it, but there’s no way I am going to try to go to sleep with this thrice damn’d thing weighing on my mind. I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep, and sleep is kind of important before an exam.

I have already had the experience of writing an exam when I had not gotten enough sleep (during College The First Time), and it was a surreal, hellish experience that I do not wish to repeat.

So now it’s just a matter of getting the damned thing written. It still pisses me off how cavalier Kwantlen and its staff are about testing you on things they did not teach. The attitude seems to me to me that if you assign it, they will do it, and so why should the profs care if they ever taught you to do the thing? If students fail, that will be reflected in their grade, not the teacher’s grade.

It makes you wonder why they bother teaching us anything at all. Why not just give us all the tests and assignments during the first class and leave it to us to figure it out? It would save a lot of time and it’s wheat they are going to do eventually anyhow.

What bothers me is the lack of an attempt to smooth the gradient. Take this course, Psych 1200, that is making me write this fricking paper. We have had absolutely no lessons on how to do a major assignment like this one. None. And because it was the final assignment, we had no idea we were not going to be taught how to do it until it was far too late.

But it’s what is easiest for the profs, so why should they care? There’s no feedback mechanism to correct this. It is, as my dear friend and nexus of fabulosity Felicity says, sink or swim.

And some of us are sinkers.

Although, to be fair, most people do not end up having to do the whole thing at the last minute due to their own stupidity either. I’m just lucky that writing comes naturally to me now. All the mental muscle in my writing zone that I have been building up over the years in this space makes it a not horrendous task.

Otherwise, I would be fucked, to be honest.

Closing in on why doing research stresses me out so much. It’s a frustration thing, I think. Dead ends take a way higher toll on my emotionally than I would like. My frustration level builds rapidly when I don’t find what I am looking for, and I can only take so much of that before it becomes quite painful and makes me prone to giving up in a rage.

And I have had this issue with frustration all my life. That’s one of the reasons I was such a pain in the ass to teach as a kid. When something didn’t come to me naturally, I would get frustrated and refused to do it, especially when it came up against my lack of visual acuity and fine motor control.

So, to put it in Internet lingo terms, I ragequit things. And that meant I never got any better at them. Nobody could force me to keep at it, and so I got away with just plain not doing it.

It would have taken someone extraordinary to get me to keep trying at those things, like arts and crafts, once I had decided I wasn’t going to do them.

I was such a handful!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been working on a project, off and on, for a few days now. I call it the Portfolio Project, and it’s my attempt to bring together the best of my considerable creative output so I can stick it on the Web somewhere, as its own website, separate from this space.

I will probably make it a Tumblr or somesuch.

And so far, it’s an enjoyable bit of business. Yesterday I went way back into the past, all the way back to 2007 when I was only 34 years old, and watched “the 30 30”, my first video project, where I did 30 days of a minimum 30 seconds of video every day.

And there’s some pretty good stuff in there. Like this :

Funny stuff. But the process ended up making me feel depressed, because to the 42 year old version of me, the guy typing to you right now, my 34 year old self seems so much more enthusiastic and energetic and alive than this old carcass of mine right now.

I suppose it disrupted the fragile illusion of youth I have been enjoying since I went back to school.

And so now I am kinda bummed out. I keep trying to remind myself that I was a lot more depressed back then and that I just seem energetic and vital in the videos because I was playing up for the camera.

But still. I don’t think if I did the same sort of video today, I would shine quite as bright.

I am also realizing how time consuming the process of going through my videos can be. And I am worried that instead of being a life-affirming journey where I look back at all the good creative work I have done over the years (as well as a way to make a sort of online creative resume), it is instead turning into a time sink which is keeping me from moving on to the next step, namely submitting my work to markets.

So I am seriously considering just skipping the video portion of the portfolio for now and concentrating on my written works. Get that done, and then worry about video as I am prepping and submitting stuff.

Submitting my stuff to people who might actually be willing to pay real cash money for it would be a really big step for me, both professionally and as a person, and I should probably focus on that rather than a trip down memory lane.

Time to send my work out into the world instead of keeping it close to me. Stop my word hoarding.

Otherwise, things have been okay for me. Found out yesterday that it’s definitively true : I will not be able to start my last final project until tomorrow, the day before it’s due.

Because the IT people at Kwantlen don’t work weekends. And I forgot my new password. I was sure I had added the new password to my Google Keep file, but nope. Dammit.

Tomorrow is gonna suuuuuck.

Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now. Moving on.

Other than those little islands of irritation, things are going okay. I seem to be keeping myself busy, if not always productive. I am gradually nudging myself in the direction of productivity, as that would likely boost my mood, but for now, I am at least on an even keel.

Had some intense dreams lately. One ended with me sitting in an enormous movie theatre and suddenly realizing I was naked, pants around my ankles.

Pretty standard dream stuff, really. I was writing about the feeling of exposure in this space yesterday. Nudity in dreams is almost always about that feeling of exposure in dreams. Feeling like you have been caught out in the open with your defenses down in some way. Your social persona stripped away.

More disturbing was the fact that, in another dream, I thought I had just turned 43, and that belief continued after I awoke. I was truly convinced that I was 43 for the entire morning, and right up until the time came for me to calculate how old I was when I did the 30 30.

That’s some spooky shit, man. Dreams are suppose to disappear upon waking. Of course I’m not 43 yet. I won’t be 43 until next May! But I really thought it was true.

Ordered in Chinese last night. Always feels good to be able to do that. Makes me feel more like an adult in control of his life, as opposed to that feeling that poverty brings that the world is full of delights that most people take for granted as options but that are closed off to you because you suck.

Gotta do my Xmas shopping soon if I want there to be any hope of the gifts arriving in time. I know what my peeps want, so it’s just a matter of getting it done.

My family gets Xmas cards, and I had better get THOSE soon too, as they have to cross the continent and in one case the border.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I was more of a multi-tasking person as opposed to a deep-focus specialist. I do tasks sequentially when they would be better done in parallel. Sometimes I can’t even think about task B until I am done with task A. This is a real drain on efficiency.

Like, I totally could have gotten the Xmas cards and sent them out before now. But I was concentrating on the next thing, which is that damned final project.

Oh well, I will get it all done eventually. Heck, I can pick up the cards when I do my shopping tonight, in all probability. Maybe buy the stamps too. So that will be good.

And well, the gift buying only involves ordering a single thing from Amazon, so… not a big deal.

Come to think of it, I have not told people what I want yet. Which means I have to fight my usual fight against the tendency for my mind to go blank when this question comes up.

I know I need a new wallet, a new pair of pants, and my Holy Grail : a pair of weatherproof, Bluetooth, USB-chargable on-ear headphones.

If I had those, I would be far more likely to walk to and from school.

Oh, and I need to come up with the forty bucks for next year’s bus pass.

It never ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am not feeling well at all right now. I hope I’m not coming down with something.

For whatever reason, I feel headache-y and dizzy and a little nauseous. And my joints are aching. Sounds like an inflammatory response of some sort to me, but damned if I know what it’s responding to. I don’t think I have been exposed to any novel chemical stimuli today. Maybe it’s just something that has been building up for a while and this is the first time I am consciously noticing it.

That sounds like something that would happen to me.

Oh, and I just noticed that the skin on my hands feels tight and tingly and itchy and sore. So there goes my rarely seen eczema. That usually only comes up when I have handled or been around certain cleaning chemicals, like the ones used in dry-cleaning. As far as I know, that hasn’t happened. But it’s not impossible that someone else in the apartment brought some dry cleaning home.

One thing is clear : something is bugging the hell out of my system. It’s pretty unhappy. It might be that my pores are all clogged. In that case, what I need is a good hot bath to open them up and clean them out.

Having oily skin and big pores can be a bit of a chore sometimes.

It could also be that my body is reacting to the lack of going out into the sunshine and fresh air compared to when I had school every weekday. In that case, the solution is to GTFO of the house, even if all I do is walk around the block or something.

Trying to think of any little chore I need to do that would provide a pretext. I do need to buy Xmas cards, I suppose. I could go to Richmond Centre and see if I could find them there.

Assuming my knee will let me, of course. Sigh. It sucks so much to love mobility just when I was getting to the point where being active didn’t hurt so much.

Stupid torn cartilage.

The reason I think it has something to do with not being outside enough is that I have felt this way before, but… not since I went back to school. So it’s something about the shirt. Not enough exercise, not enough sunshine, not enough fresh air, too much lounging about naked with no clothes to soak up sweat.

Yeah, I have been doing that. But I am going to stop. In fact, I am going to get up and get dressed right now. I bet it will make me feel a lot better.

(—)

And I’m back. Wow, that’s probably the shortest amount of time my little symbol has ever represented.

Can’t say I feel all that different, to be honest. Maybe I should crack a window and air this little box of mine out. Ventilation is always a key factor with me.

I’m so sensitive.

Another clue : something happened to me this morning that hasn’t happened in a while. I woke up, used the bathroom, and then…. just plain could not get back to sleep. And it wasn’t just insomnia. Lying down, I felt like I couldn’t breathe properly. I had to get up and use the computer for a while until this tense, panicky feeling left me. And even then, I couldn’t get to sleep, I just didn’t feel so bad.

Until I got up after a brief doze after lunch, and then I felt like crap again.

Obvious question : was I using my CPAP last night? Answer : I am pretty sure I was. Because putting on or taking off the CPAP mask is something I do in that twilit area between sleep and wakefulness, I can’t ever be totally sure. There have been times when I woke up with the mask off when I was pretty sure I had gone to sleep with it on.

So it’s not impossible that I took it off some time in the night without waking up. That would be messed up, but I can’t rule it out.

Still, the shortness of breath I experienced today is disturbingly familiar. It’s definitely something I remember from my life as a virtual shut-in. So whatever is disturbing my system, I have been here before.

Enough obsessing about my health. Biological update : I have now registered for classes next semester. So I am good and done on that front. God bless and the crick don’t rise.

Registering was a total bitch, as usual. I can’t believe I was looking forward to it. The first three courses I signed up for – two Philosophies and a Creative Writing – went super easy and lulled me into feeling like it wasn’t going to be so bad.

But courses 4 and 5 were a freaking nightmare.

I wanted to get one of my math-y courses done this semester, but that turned out not to be possible. Everything was either full, not offered in Richmond, or would have required me to be at school before noon.

And homey don’t play that.

But that is what happens when you are showing up late to the buffet like I am. I wanted to do it two weeks ago, but I couldn’t because of fees, deposits, etc.

So I had to take what I could get. So many awesome sounding courses just plain not offered in Richmond. And I couldn’t talk myself into taking something at the Surrey campus, even though I totally could.

I am sure the Surrey campus is somewhere near transit.

Oh well, nothing is totally set in stone yet.

So it was a lot of blind alleys eventually leading to me ended up with a Linguistics course (basically Linguistics 101, which should be awesome because I love language) and History of Canada from 1867 to Present, because I was really desperate.

And I am really looking forward to be that smug kind of Canadian who actually knows more Canadian history than American history. When everyone else is in that particularly Canadian moment of awkwardness where you realize that nobody in the conversation knows something they are pretty sure they should know as Canadians but don’t, I will actually know it, and as an act of largess, share it with others as though I am just reminding them of something they totally knew but had forgotten for the moment.

And then I will join in the Canadian tradition of feeling quietly, smugly superior to others.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I am in a painful but fruitful healing phase right now.

But first : the biographical update. Had therapy, talked about my life situation and becoming depressed and so forth. Got an important bit of lore from him : when you load money onto your reloadable VISA, the reported balance will not change… but the money’s there nonetheless.

So, no financial Phantom Zone except for the delay in updating the balance. Still have no idea why they would do that, but I assume it has something to do with security.

Because honestly, what doesn’t these days?

So when I got back home, I was able to pay the deposit, so THAT hurdle has been surmounted at least. The system, last time I checked, is still not letting me register, but I assume that it will just be a matter of time before the system updates itself, or somesuch.

So I least I have that as an achievement for today.

Back to the healing thing. I think therapy was quite productive today as, in the process of explaining my situation, I ended up coming to a greater understanding of myself and what I go through.

That’s where the cycle of healing comes into the picture. I realized that my recovery process has a predictable cycle. It goes like this :

1. An iceberg calves off the slowly dwindling glacier that is my damage, my depression.
2. I feel worse than usual because I am processing the pain frozen in that ice.
3. As the iceberg floats south and melts, the pain lessens.
4. Eventually the iceberg is completely melted, and the pain is gone for good.
5. Honeymoon period where I feel so much better with my now smaller glacier. Such a relief!
6. Period of stability where things are more or less normal for a while
7. The pressure of the healing process starts building up again, eventually leading to..
8. Another iceberg calves off, and the cycle begins anew.

The product of this healing cycle is not measured by how I feel at any given moment, but by how much that glacier has shrunk over time. The fact that it’s cyclical means that it is hard to see the progress moment to moment if I only concentrate on how I feel right now.

But when I look back at who I was even as recently as last August. and try to remember what it was like back then, it is all too clear how far this healing cycle has taken me, and it gives me faith that some day, the glacier will be gone and I will be able to truly feel the warmth of the sun on my soul.

It troubles me to truly contemplate how numb I have been, and how that has effected my life. I was so frozen and stiff inside that it really didn’t matter what was going on outside my fortress of solitude^[1].

It would have been very difficult for anyone to reach me anyhow.

And that is extremely tragic. I had (and have) a lot to offer the world, but that frozen prison of depression and social anxiety was too much of a handicap. It preserved my intellect and other scholastic skills, but it froze out a lot of important social instincts and social information that might have been very useful in my attempt to get along with my fellow humans.

Speaking of which, I have been thinking more about the idea that I might be somewhere on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum some more thought. I have not considered myself to be “on the spectrum” because I don’t show any of the usual major symptoms of Asperger’s, like trouble reading facial expressions, difficulty in understanding why people do things, poor theory of mind, or any of the sensory issues.

But lately I have been wondering. I was a pretty weird kid right from the getgo. I never had an imaginary friend and I had no interest in playing out scenarios with my toys. For as long as I can remember, I have had a very serious, literal, inquisitive mind that rapidly saw through the usual illusions and did not feel the compulsions of authority or the fear of adults and their power.

And let me be clear : I was born this way. I can’t blame it on any of the bad things that have happened to me in my life. This attitude came pre-installed in my particular model of brain.

But it’s a very strange model to have. From what I gather from pop culture, most kids go through stages, like having an imaginary friend and playing out scenarios with toys, I never went through at all. I never decided I was some kind of animal and acted that way all day.^[2] I didn’t have elaborate Calvin and Hobbes imaginary play sessions. I never really saw the appeal of the sandbox or the monkey bars. I never even finger-painted or drew lines with crayons on construction paper.

I was, in many (but by no means all), far too mature for my age. Those things all seemed silly and pointless to me. Maybe that’s just a function of high intelligence, I don’t know.

But even the high IQ nerdly folks I know did things like play obsessively with their Lego sets or draw fantasy maps or things like that.

So what the hell was up with me?

I have never even heard of another kid like that. Even the Asperger’s people I know did more of the usual child type things than I did.

All I wanted was books and TV and video games. And later on, stimulating conversation.

That seems strangely… specialized to me now. It’s almost as though, in a way, I focused in on one or two specific interests to the exclusion of all others.

Kinda sounds like Asperger’s to me. And again… I was born this way.

Maybe in some ways, I am not neurotypical at all. I’m just a really high functioning autistic.

Or maybe I am just a nerd. I dunno.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.