I don’t feel very good right now.

I feel twitchy and anxious and paranoid and overwhelmed. I feel like I just plain can’t handle life right now and all I want to do is hide till it all goes away.

I know that part of it is simply caffeine jitters. I had a litre of Diet Coke with lunch and if there is one think I have learned about being a slave to the caff, it’s that if its dark gift is not used, it turns into anxiety, tension, and all the rest.

Makes sense. Don’t call up energy unless you’re going to use it.

But stupidly, I decided to take a nap after lunch instead of going straight to blogging, like I usually do. Blogging expresses the energy and that keeps me moving for a thousand words. To lay down and nap just because I felt sort of sleepy was dumb.

Doing it without having the CPAP on was doubly dumb.

So now I am not only tense and jittery, I’m also enjoy the effects of low blood oxygen. Wee.

And I also have a headache, which is honestly the thing making everything else seem worse. I just took a fistful of acetaminophen. I hope that does the damn job. My head feels like something is trying to drill its way out of my sinuses.

Trying to figure out why I am not more angry at my dad for making life miserable for the whole family during my childhood. Life would have been so much nicer without him. His tirades and attacks at the dinner table were only the most direct and blatant expression of his rage.

Day to day life with him around did more damage, to me and to my siblings.

I guess part of why I am not more angry is simple exhaustion. I am tired. Getting angry requires energy.

But the real deal is that familiar terror of my own capacity for rage. I feel like if I started getting mad at him, I would never stop. My rage at him (the rage he gave me) is so vast and potent that I am afraid that if I open that door at all, I will explode.

That’s not the sort of thing that actually happens, I would imagine. But it feels like it will.

So all I can do is release the anger a little bit at a time and hope that it helps over time. He wasn’t the only one who hurt me in my childhood, but he’s the main one.

And yet, it was all indirect (well, almost all). I suffered more from the tense atmosphere than from his actual anger. I was very afraid of him, and really preferred not to be around him at all, but I didn’t become the focus of his rage very much.

It was the walking on eggshells that really drained me. Childhood shouldn’t be like that. It should be a time for friendship, family, and fun. Not fear.

They say that one of the most psychologically damaging things is long-term stress about something which you cannot predict or control. That’s why soldiers in Afghanistan have such a high rate of mental breakdown. They can’t predict or control when they will be attacked or encounter an IED or end up in the middle of a violent sectarian dispute, so they end up mentally ill from the strain.

Most recover once they get out of the war zone. But some don’t.

I grew up in a kind of war zone. I could never tell when my father would go off. I went through my period of believing that I could control it by doing everything right, just like a lot of victims of abuse.

But that didn’t work, and it didn’t work because he was a toxic, angry man who needed to abuse people in order to calm his inner demons. My siblings and I could have done everything exactly the way he wanted them done and he still would have gotten mad at us for something else, even if he had to invent an excuse.

So we lived in a house with no way to avoid or even predict when the bad stuff would hit us. At times, it seemed like there was no hope.

And sometimes, I think we took it out on each other.

Back to my own tension in the here and now. I think I went through this same thing in the first month of my first semester, when it all seemed so overwhelming and I was sure I was going to crash and burn.

Then the first round of tests came along, I did great on them without even studying, , and I was like “Well…. that was easy. ” And for the rest of the semester, I was chill.

Dunno if that will happen again. I hope it does, but in another way, I hope it doesn’t. It might do me a lot of good to face something where I have to try really hard in order to succeed.

Academically speaking, life has been very easy for me.

I haven’t been doing that well physically lately, probably because of the sugary shit I have been eating. I’m super thirsty all the time, I drink tons of water, I pee frequently.

Peeing once an hour becomes quite tiresome after a while.

So part of my revitalization has to be getting my diet back under control. No more muffins. If I want something dessert-like, it will have to be something sugar free, or it had better be at least two weeks since I had something else sugary.

The restricted diet of a diabetic can be very depressing. But it beats feeling crappy all the time.

Still, I wonder what it would be like if I had tons of money. That would make the temptation far worse. Without the financial barrier, all the sweet things in the world are open to you.

Then again, so are the neat ways to exercise. Hmm.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By Jane Austen.

Another Therapy Thursday. I told my therapist today about something I had figured out about myself : a lot of my anxiety is a result of my father’s (and to a far lesser extent, my siblings’) impatience with me.

My father is an angry, impatient guy. Growing up with him as a father meant constant danger. You could only really relax when he wasn’t around. Otherwise, at any second, you might get swept up into has anger and his impatience. It meant living, in many ways, on the edge. Constantly.

I remember that there were a few times when he went on a trip by himself when I was growing up. With him gone, it was a whole different household. Not only were my siblings and I safe from him, but without him around to make us tense, we were far more relaxed with one another.

Those were some of the happiest times in my life. Three weeks with him gone was better than three years of therapy. It was like Heaven.

I think it took me this long to make the connection between his impatience and my anxiety because a) I don’t like thinking about him, ever, at all, for reasons that should be clear right now but mostly b) the tension he created in the lives of my family was so pervasive that it’s hard to perceive.

It was the water we swam in, and it poisoned us all.

Because when you are a kid, you internalize things like that. I realized in therapy today that in many ways, I am still acting and behaving (and feeling) like he’s still around. The real life Larry Donald Bertrand has been out of my life for twenty years, but the one in my head has never left.

Not that I hear his voice or anything. It’s far deeper than that. It’s the emotional responses dealing with him trained into me that remain. It’s this unrelenting inner impatience with accompanying anxiety that needs no voice or commands to enforce itself.

All it needs is the ability to make me feel like whatever I’m doing, I’m doing it too slowly or wrong or both, in order to perpetuate itself.

I used to blame my sister Catherine for my feeling that I was doing everything wrong and that I was helpless and should just let others do things for me because I will only screw it up and someone will have to do it for me anyway plus fix the mess I made of things as well.

And it’s true she nitpicked me and I felt like I could never make her happy.

But now that I see how LDB made all of us so tense and anxious, I wonder if that wasn’t just my sister expressing said tension in her own way. Some people express negative emotion through nitpicking and fault finding. It’s not pleasant to be the object of it, but the person means well.

They just have a funny way of showing it.

I’m not sure why I never felt like I could meet her standards. I suppose when I was a kid, the things she asked of me seemed random and arbitrary and impossible to predict, even though it’s clear to me now that she just wanted me to be presentable.

And it’s not like anyone else was taking an interest in me. I think she was trying to take care of me in her own way, and when I think about that now, I want to give her a big hug and thank her for trying to do for me what nobody else was interested in doing.

And tell her I wish I had been more appreciative and attentive at the time.

The tension my father generated also goes a long way towards explaining why people were so unwilling to slow down and teach me to do things when I was a kid. His impatience made everyone impatient. That’s just how people react to tense, hostile situations. It’s not wonderful, and in a perfect world, his being like he is would have caused my siblings and my mother to become very close to one another, like soldiers going through basic training together.

But it didn’t, or at least, it didn’t for me. Instead, I think, we were isolated by it. Maybe if we had been a less cerebral family and hence more open to acting on instinct and emotion, we would have banded together against my dad and made him either calm down and behave, or GTFO.

The thing is, though, leadership comes from the top – it has to – and my mother didn’t fight back against him. She took it all, and did nothing to defend us from him. What could we do in that situation?

We were just little kids.

Now that I have made the connection, it seems so obvious that my constant state of tension from which there is no real relief comes from him. Long before I was ever bullied in school, I was bullied at home, and by the man who should have been my number one protector.

Fathers are supposed to make their kids feel safe. Not scared. Scared is the opposite of safe.

Now that I know this, I can fight back. I can make the crucial separation between my anxiety and myself, and recognize it as his problem, not mine. And I am not putting up with it any more.

So let this be the beginning of the eviction process. Get the hell out of my mind, Larry Donald Bertrand. You were a lousy father, and if you don’t believe me, just look at the kids you raised.

All four of us have had to fight mental illness in our lives. None of us have reproduced. We have all had problems in our lives we can tie directly to your glowering presence.

We never expected perfection of you, Larry.

We just wanted to feel safe in our own home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…here’s a summary of the last few days.

Yesterday was my Long Day, the one with six hours of class in a row. Creative Writing, the first one, went fine. I kind of feel like the instructor and I^[1] are from different planets, because she is definitely more nonlinear and unstructured than me. In this, she better fits the classic stereotype of the “creative type” better than I do, but I don’t fit in most stereotypes, and I don’t think less of her for it.

It just causes communication issues because I am the type of person who uses (and understands) words very very precisely and she… is not. So there will be times when I really need a clarification on something and she just plain can’t provide it.

Presumably, she is used to operating in a milieu where people can figure out what she means. Being the undersocialized sap that I am, I either can’t, or I can but it annoys the crap out of me. Especially coming from a writing teacher. Use your words!

And there’s a very dark, very sarcastic, very male that wants to declare that if she is not at least my equal by my own definition of use of language, she’s not good enough to teach me, and she should either learn to have more discipline and focus, or let someone else teach.

Luckily, I know that is wrong. I don’t have any right to demand people fit into little boxes. It’s not like I would let someone do that to me. So I will learn her way, and probably gain a lot of very valuable perspective into minds that don’t work like mine at all.

It helps that sometimes the students can fill in the gap for me.

In class, we did a bunch of 2 minute writing exercises, which I quite enjoyed, except for having to stop when the timer goes off. That’s a rule I simply cannot follow. I have to finish the sentence. So every time, I kept writing.

Luckily, nonlinear creative types are not into the strict enforcement of rules.

Then came Lingusitics, and brother, have I bitten off more than I can chew. We have to learn so much so fast and the teacher, while friendly and funny, is also quite demanding of us in that regard. I get the feeling that we are being taught in the modern European style, which is very much in the “demand a lot and believe they can do it” model of education, and that’s a rough adjustment for us mentally flabby Canadian types.

It’s like I am suddenly enrolled into a very friendly boot camp.

So my fears that Linguistics would be just as tough as my Psych classes last semester were well-founded. I am going to do my best to meet the challenge, but I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t swap this course for a second year Psych class right now.

I am beginning to feel like the fact that I am a great writer and a wizard of words is actually a liability in this course. Doing things like identifying parts of speech or roots and affixes and things like that come so swiftly and naturally to me that it is outright painful for me to slow it down and do it the way she wants me to do it.

Not that I think this is some arbitrary exercise designed to torture me. I am not nearly that ego-bound. But that is how it feels sometimes, reason be damned.

It reminds me of being in elementary school and losing marks on math problems because I didn’t “show my work”, I just worked it out in my head.

That usually went something like this :

Me : But I got the answer right!
Teacher : Yes, but it doesn’t count because you didn’t show your work!
Me : Why do I have to show my work?
Teacher : Because I have to be sure that you are doing it the right way!
Me : You mean there’s a wrong way to get the right answer?
Teacher : Yes! That’s why you have to show me the steps you took to get the answer!
Me : But these ARE the steps I used. What you really mean is, steps other people would use.

And so forth and so on. Good lord I was hard to deal with. Too smart for my own damned good.

Then there was today, which was Canadian History Since 1867, which was fine. I like learning these things. The third hour is always discussion of the assigned reading, and for once, I had actually done the reading!

Well, most of it, anyhow. Around 70 percent.

Afterward, I went and got muffins at the Tim’s, then just as I was leaving… the freaking fire alarm goes off. From what I overheard, it was the second time that day.

Add in the one last week, and I have to wonder. As far as I can see it, there are many possibly explanations as to why this keeps happening :

a) We have a serial arsonist on our hands.
b) We have a serial alarm-puller on our hands.
c) Despite being a concrete building, KPU Richmond is surprisingly flammable
d) Someone has foolishly angered Thrakzul, the Fire God, and soon we shall pay in blood for our impertinence
e) Three completely separate fires happened within the same week with absolutely no connect between them

Personally, I find that last one pretty implausible.

Anyhow, the result of the fire alarm was that I had to wait for my bus outside, in the dark and the rain, inside of doing most of the waiting inside where it’s warm.

I was very happy to see that bus.

That brings you up to date. This is the channel to stay on for the latest news on the situation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I grow increasingly annoyed with myself re : my procrastination.

I keep leaving everything to the last moment, even though I know that’s stupid. For example, I have had a week to do my Linguistics homework, and I only did it right before I sat down here to blog.

I told my fingers to type “blog” at the end of that sentence. First time through, they typed “play”. I am thinking I am having inner childcare issues.

I guess it could be said that I didn’t have a childhood, in that I didn’t have friends. I had a lot of independence, and there were certainly things I did for fun, and had fun doing.

But I get the feeling the real joys of childhood passed me by, and now my inner child wants to have fun fun fun without really having a clear idea of what that would even mean.

But if I had to guess, I would say it probably involves either other human beings and/or a lot more money.

When I think about what I really want right now, the first word that comes to mind is security. I want that carefree safe feeling that comes from a less restrictive, more secure life, and that means more money. My poverty makes me feel very vulnerable and cut off from the happy warm world of those with a better income, and I want to feel a lot more connected and included and, dare I say, grown up.

The desire to feel grown up might be one of the most childish desires of all. But it’s how I feel. I feel like I have completely failed to grow up and now I want to feel legitimate and worthy, instead of foolish and worthless. I desperately want to be able to afford nice clothing that fits well and good meals at decent restaurants and most of all, to be able to deal with people my age with my head held high.

Instead, I tend to feel the crippling shame that comes with my particular brand of failure to thrive. Compared to them I have done absolutely nothing with my life and I therefore have a status less than zero.

And knowing that I have been very sick for a very long time and it’s not my fault helps, but that only goes so far. A lot of time has passed me by, decades that I can’t ever get back, and the result is a deep feeling of inadequacy and a desperate desire to make up for lost time.

But I don’t have the resources to do that. Poverty really cripples a person that way. I can want advancement and legitimacy all I want, but until I at least have an Associate’s degree, I don’t have a way of acquiring it. I can tell employers how exceptional I am, but I have no way to prove it.

Plus there is the whole deal with my mental health. I can fool myself sometimes into thinking my social anxiety isn’t a problem any more, but it totally is. The terror I feel at the coming group work in my Introduction to Ethics class is proof enough of that.

My social and interpersonal issues run very deep. It’s hard to feel included when your strongest instinct is to eschew inclusion in favour of autonomy. As much as one part of me wants to be looking out from the inside for a change, another part sees that as a trap and prefers to be alone in the darkness outside, looking in and observing without ever becoming part of anything.

It’s that scared little animal in me, telling me that I am only safe if I have complete freedom of movement. It’s like I am a half-feral cat, willing to come inside for food as long as you leave the door open, but the moment you even look like you might be thinking about closing that door, I am out like a streak and it will be days before you see me again.

Better darkness and cold than being trapped, no matter how tempting the bait.

And it is going to take a long long time to domesticate myself. And it’s something I will have to do myself, as I am far too skittish for anyone else to do it for me.

I suppose it’s possible that the right person could make me feel safe enough for me to relax and stop looking for the exits in every situation.

But I can hardly wait for such a person to come along, now, can I?

And I know that means I should be pushing my own limits, but I feel so tired so much of the time. And stressed, in a way. So it’s hard to imagine pushing myself even further. It feels like that would be a nightmare and I would just end up feeling crazier as a result.

And I really don’t need to feel any crazier. One of the great things about going back to school is that it makes me feel sane and competent when I am there. School is good. School is something I can do. I didn’t have to do a job interview to get to school. I didn’t have to worry about rejection.

Rejection hits me hard. That comes from having a toxic childhood, according to an article I read recently. I can dig it. I did get rejected by my parents repeatedly as a child.

Most passively. Occasionally actively. I certainly didn’t feel like I was important to them at all.

In fact, I didn’t even feel welcome.

So yeah. I got a whole lot of crazy left inside me and birthing it to let it go will take a long long time, far too long for my impatient inner child who just wants to play and have fun.

But at least I am more awake and alive now than I have been in a long long time, and while that is not always pleasant, it is always good.

I’m getting there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just watched most of the premiere episode of the new Fox series Lucifer, and I thought it was very good.

The basic idea is that Lucifer (yes, that one) has gotten bored in Hell and has come to Earth and is keen on punishing the wicked before they die. ^[1]. He hooks up with a detective in the LAPD who nobody wants to work with because she stuck her neck way, way out on a case and it backfired. Also, she was in a fictional movie called Hot Tub High School (damn I love that name) in which she was extremely nude, and this fact continues to plague her life.

And the actor, Tom Ellis, who plays Lucifer Morningstar (how redundant) is magnificent as Satan on Earth. He is devilishly good looking and charming and self-confident and his British accent really helps sell it. He is so smooth and sure of himself that you can really believe he is the Great Tempter himself.

Also, so far, his powers are well defined and limited. He’s immortal, because duh. That also means he can’t be hurt. He has the ability to draw out people’s deepest desires, so people tend to tell him their deepest darkest secrets. And most women go absolutely soggy-knickers for him from the first time they see him, which has great comedic potential.

They define that power as “being irresistible to the opposite sex”, but I hope that sooner or later they give a nod to the fact that it wouldn’t always be the opposite sex who was attracted to him.

And I would be pretty disappointed if they made Satan heterosexual.

Plus, I think he can read people’s souls and examine their entire life.

All of those are very interesting and yet limited powers. None of them are plotfuckers^[2] and yet they are all very powerful and very interesting. Lucifer is nowhere near omniscient, so he needs the detective to help him solve cases and punish the guilty. He can’t fly or teleport or anything like that. In fact, none of his powers even require special effects, which I am sure must have helped sell the pilot.

And the woman playing Detective Chloe Dancer, Lauren German, has more than enough screen presence to counter Tom Ellis’ scene-stealing Satan. She really seems like she can hold her own against him.

And of course, she is mysteriously immune to his Satanic charms. Which intrigues him.

Add in the fact that I love anything dealing with Heaven and/or hell (or demons or angels or whatever) and the show pretty much has me.

None of it would work if the writing didn’t work, of course. And the writing is superb. I understand that the show is based on a series of graphic novels (isn’t everything today?) and I hope the great writing comes straight from the comic.

It’s a great premise because it uses the fact that evil is always cooler than good to create a “hero” with all the badass qualities of Satan, but using them for good.

I mean honestly, isn’t punishing the wicked something everyone can enjoy?

There’s also some stuff involving a rival to the throne of Hell telling Lucifer that he is getting too close to the humans and becoming weak and if he keeps it up, the rival will go to war with Lucifer and take over Hell. And the rival is a big tell sexy black dude, which is a major plus in my books.

I mean dayum.

Plus I love the theme of evil being tempted by good. It flips the usual bullshit about temptation on its head and reminds us that there are a lot of benefits to not being evil. It’s not a matter of having to choose between a boring and joyless “good” life or a hedonistic fun “evil” life.

It’s more a matter of what pleasures mean most to you. Myself, I can’t imagine anything rivaling the kind of pleasure I get from making people happy and helping them with their burdens. I am not claiming to be immune to selfish pleasures, and heavens know I could probably be corrupted by the right circumstances.

In fact, twenty years of poverty have made it ridiculously easy. Right now, I would sell out for a nice vacation, to be honest.

But as it stands right now, I want to make people happy more than anything in the world. I want to bring joy into their lives. And not some oversimplified notion of joy, but the kind of deep joy that makes you feel like everything is right with the world and you are truly blessed.

When it comes to what I want to do with my art, my ambition has no limit.

And to me, the pleasures of being evil can’t possibly compare with the pleasures of being good, because being good not only comes with the good feeling of knowing you did something to make the world a better place, but it also boosts your self-worth as a good person and evil can’t compare to that.;

That’s why, when I see those fun stories where Satan offers someone absolutely anything for their soul, I always imagine myself saying “Okay, I want you to make the world twice as happy a place for everyone. ” Or simply, “I want you to put an end to evil forever. ”

They are requests I know Old Scratch can’t fulfill because they would basically put him out of a job, and I would enjoy the look on his face when I reminded him how limited his powers are.

Probably not a smart thing to do, but it would be oh, so much fun.

I guess that’s enough from me for today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now. Part of me is fighting really hard to be positive, but meeting stiff resistance from the paralytic ennui and despair of depression, and the result is a constant balancing act between depression and mania.

So how’s YOUR head doing? Because it’s all fucked up in here.

Hopefully, now that I have eaten, I will be able to settle down and attain some kind of stable mood. Doesn’t seem likely right at the moment, but it is possible.

But the odds are that I will do what I always end up doing : plowing ahead by sheer determination, ignoring the chaos inside my cranium, and get through my day one step at a time.

Fuck the wind. Fuck the rain. Fuck the cold. Fuck the thunder AND the lightning. I will continue to put one foot in front of the other no matter what.

And all the time, the world happens around me, and I don’t feel a thing.

Just like in this video.

That’s the cost of being Numb.

First time I saw that video, I connected with it (and the song, of course). That’s pretty much exactly what depression is like. You keep going, and life happens around you, but nothing really gets through. And you sit there, numb yet hurting, feeling completely alone, no matter what the actual truth of your life is. The whole world seems to be made of DON’T. Everything is poisonous and boobytrapped and wrong. There is no safety, only an endless list of things not to do.

Eventually, you just stop trying anything. What’s the point? Nothing is good. Nothing is worth the cost. Your only hope is to do as little as possible and shut the world out as much as you possibly can.

That’s when you learn that despair can be a blessed relief.

Sometimes I look out at the world with reptilian eyes, wondering with perfect detachment what all those warm blooded mammals are doing in their hot and urgent lives, and it all seems so strange to me. What must that be like, to be alive inside? How can it possibly be worth all the trouble and the stress? It’s so much better to be safe in my isolation, observing and analyzing and finding patterns, knowing that no matter how close I get to that hot and stimulating world, I will be safe inside my sheath of ice. I might even laugh at all those silly people out there, living their crazed lives of contrasts and collisions, and all the while the lizard inside me moves like the ultimate anthropologist through the herd, unmolested.

Then comes the contempt and loathing. Fuck all you goddamned people. You all can just go to hell. None of you were ever truly there for me. So fuck you all, individually and as a group. You won’t let me in, I won’t let you in to hurt me, then. You can rot, die, and roast eternally for all I care.

Time to give all the coldness inside me back to the world, with a vengeance. Maybe then I will be able to find room for some wholesome healing in my heart.

It shock me how much loathing and contempt I have inside me. It doesn’t fit my self-image at all. But that is what isolation does to a person. You end up all frostbitten, ice-scraped, filthy meat soaking in ten Spring’s worth of runoff inside. Nothing can get in, so nothing can get out, and all your pain, loneliness, and heartache just keeps building up until you feel like you are going to drown in it.

And buried deep inside is a voice just screaming and screaming where nobody, not even you, can hear.

And you sometimes wonder if you should just let yourself fall apart. End the slow death march to a pointless and worthless grave, withdraw from reality entirely, and let the world do what it will with you.

Catatonics have very few worries, and nobody expects anything of them. Bliss.

Either that, or do something extremely and vividly crazy to force the world to pay attention to you for once. Walk naked into a police station and take a shit on the floor while maintaining eye contact. Throw bowling balls off an overpass into rush hour traffic and then pretend all the chaos and mayhem that ensues has nothing to do with you.

Those poor people! Someone should do something to protect them from people like me. What a shame.

Or even take some hostages and when the cops show up, make absurd, demeaning, and downright disturbing demands of the authorities. I’ll let them go if you get ten men to ejaculate simultaneously on live TV.

You have to admit, the ratings on that would be through the ROOF.

So the reptile becomes the maniac. Guess we weren’t that safe after all. Turns out that rather than a peaceful and bemused observer, you are that most dangerous of beasts, the intelligent lunatic. Detachment and peace? Bullshit. That only leads to lunacy and derangement as you try to blame and punish the world for the isolation you, yourself have imposed yourself.

The world does not owe you people willing to crawl through the minefield of your defenses to deliver some warmth to you despite how hard you fight it. It’s a crazy thing to expect of anyone and an even more insane yardstick by which to measure the world.

At some point, it’s going to have to be you that opens the door. People can knock, but only you can let them in, and if you don’t, eventually they will give up and go away.

And you can’t fault them for that.

Once you realize that it is the terror of letting things in that is the real source of your pain, you can throw away all the anger and pain and concentrate on overcoming yourself.

Only then can you join the rest of the world in the sunshine and the rain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess what I had for dinner and what I watched while I was eating it?

Decided it was KFC’s turn tonight. And there is definitely something changing about me, because I ordered a four piece Big Box meal and I didn’t even slow down till the last piece.

And not that long ago, even a single piece of fried chicken made me feel like I had guzzled used bacon grease. Now, apparently, I am insatiable.

It could be a vitamin B12 thing, I suppose. It’s my body’s way of saying EATING MORE MEAT DAMMIT. Give me animal products! Meat! Dairy! Eggs! Anything! I need B12 you fat fool!

Yes, my body fat-shames me. Oh well. Ours has never been a happy relationship.

And now, triptophan^[1] battles it out with caffeine in my bloodstream, making me feel alert and sleepy at the same time. I might end up having to do this blog entry in halves if the triptophan (plus the lovely heat coming from the wall heater) wins the day.

I hate doing that, though. I want my blog entries to be a single…. thing. A single rambling, meandering, incoherent thing, but still…. a thing.

Going back to something I have stopped working on, even if the thing is far from finished, is physically painful to me. I clearly have some weird shit going on in my brain concerning what exactly it is I am doing when I write.

I can’t escape the awful truth. I have danced around it for years now, never quite coming out and saying it, but the brutal truth is that, on a deep psychological level, writing for me is…

…an act of elimination. (I’m so sorry. )

The Freudian signposts are all there. When I write, I am pushing out what is inside of me. Often, that is the stuff I won’t went to be in my mind any more. And after I stop, I never want to see it again.

The very idea of going back grosses me out. Unspeakably so. So when I am done, I move on as fast as I can and never ever look back.

Well that’s not entirely true. If it was, I would not have been able to collect all 40 of my short stories together without puking. So presumably, after a certain time, a form of mental detachment occurs, and I can stands to see a story or whatnot again.

In fact, I am often quite pleased with what I have written. But it takes a long time.

Hmmm. Something shady is going on. I ordered my new computer last night, and everything seemed to be in order. Then at 3 PM today, I get an email from someone named Jenny Huang saying that my credit card had been declined, and would I like to resubmit my credit card information to her, over email.

Or if not, she could always call me!

I don’t fucking think so. Nobody honest ever asks you for your credit card info over email, and the phone is hardly any more secure. Like I would be able to tell if the person on the other end of the line really worked for NCIX or not!

I have contacted NCIX about it. But I am growing very suspicious. This seems very much like a scam. Like someone has inserted themselves into the NCIX online ordering process somewhere in order to steal credit card information and resell it at profit.

Well fuck THAT. I can buy a computer from a lot of places. It doesn’t have to be NCIX. If they are compromised like this, I don’t dare trust them.

I am sure lots of local businesses would love to sell me a computer. I like NCIX… it strikes me as a by geeks for geeks kind of place, and those are the people I trust to sell me a decent computer because if they don’t, their geeky customers will figure it out and come back with highly technically correct complaints.

What’s worse, it would make them seem like they didn’t know how to put a computer together properly, and that would mean they were inferior geeks, and that is just plain unacceptable.

I know how techie type geeks think. They would rather die than have their skills at something as “simple” as PC assembly be questioned.

But now I wonder. I really hope their security hasn’t been compromised so badly that it makes it impossible to order from them. I would rather they got my business…. but there’s a trust issue now.

Not much else happening in my life. Thinking of getting my monitor (I have to get a new monitor too because VGA is barely even supported any more) from Monitor King, another local business.

I would love to say I shop locally when I can purely out of some noble desire to keep my money out of the clutches of sociopathic megacorps, but the truth is, I just want to be able to meet the person who is selling me something and connect with them on a (slightly) personal level so that I know who is getting my money, and they know who they would, potentially, be ripping off.

That way, neither of us is just some numbers on a screen. I truly believe that makes both sides of the transaction more honest. There are a lot of immoral acts that most people would never do if it meant hurting someone right in front of them, but might just consider if all they had to do was use their computer like they normally do, typing in things and clicking on things, in a way that makes money go to them.

I think that’s the main reason why the 1 percent can make morally reprehensible decisions so easily. These people are not, as individuals, sociopaths. I am sure they pet puppies, treat their children like gold, and truly believe something should be done to help the homeless.

But actions unconscionable on a personal level become quite acceptable when you know you will never, ever, ever see the consequences of your actions.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is the soundtrack to this blog entry :

Today has been one of those days. I started off on the wrong foot and from then on, it was little thing after little thing, until right now, I am cranky and irritable and feel like biting someone.

Luckily, I am alone.

The wrong first step was that when I was woken up by my alarm at 9:10 this morning, I immediately started freaking out about how little time I had before my bus.

Nothing good ever comes of me freaking out about something.

So from that point on, I was trying my best to get everything done (including watching some Netflix) in a state of panic, and feeling like I was juggling live hand grenades.

I did manages to eat, but it clearly wasn’t nearly enough, because I was already feeling the effects of low blood sugar a half hour into class.

But first I had to get to the bus. First, I hit the lobby and take a look outside and curse because it’s raining. And raining in a very serious, cinematic way that suggested it did not plan on stopping any time soon and I might as well get used to it.

And then, on the way to the bus stop, I trip and fall onto the cold hard pavement again, this time because my shoelace had come undone and that made the shoe way too loose.

So I fall flat on my face crossing Cook. Luckily, I was not far from the curb, so I at least didn’t end up getting run over. And the fact that I was already adrenalized really helped because I had the energy and will on hand to just get up, get my ass across the street, and catch my fucking bus.

While being rained on. And with no hat to protect me, because I somehow managed to lose mine. All while struggling to close my fucking bag with its lousy zipper.

So, not in a happy mood. And, like I said above, pretty soon I had low blood sugar in order to really stoke the fires or irritation. I knew this was Bad. So when we got a break, I went to the vending machines just outside the classroom and bought me a Rice Crispy Square.

Aaaaand it got stuck on the ring and didn’t fall. Because of course it did. And the weird thing is, I knew it would happen. I took a look at the Squares in the machine and the ring mine was on, and had a flash intuition that it would not get the job done.

So I had to buy another to get my first one to fall. Hey, buy 2, get one! It’s the opposite of a sale. Normally, I would never do that, but I knew I needed that thing in order to remain conscious in class, and to not, ya know, die.

And that kept me going till the end of class, and I thought I was doing okay, but when I stood up, the room wobbled a tad and I knew I needed something else.

But I had things to do! This was my chance to buy that final textbook that has eluded me thus far! So when I went to the bookstore, I bought a few little two-packs of cookies. And something far more important.

I got a three hole punch!

I had almost given up when I found it. There it was, the office supply of my dreams! Cost me eighteen bucks, which is about what I thought. Now I can three hole punch the handouts I am given and insert them into the binder with the rest of that day’s notes.

You have no idea how happy that makes me.

So the cookies evened me out enough to do the other thing I had planned, which was to get a half dozen muffins from Tim’s. That was harder than it sounds because Timmie’s appears to have designed their muffin selection to exclude me, especially since they dropped the Pumpkin Spice Muffin.

Everything is something I like with something I don’t like in it to ruin it. Hey look, it’s banana…. pecan. It’s white chocolate…. cranberry. It’s birthday cake… with tarantulas.

One of those is not real.

And they only had three of the whole wheat carrot ones I like. The girl at the counter said “I would love to, but you only have three!”. Eventually, I settled for three whole wheat carrot, and three chocolate chip.

Why buy three muffins I didn’t particularly want? Because I didn’t want to disappoint the girl behind the counter. I really am a sap sometimes.

I mean, chocolate chip muffins are not even real muffins, in my books. They’re cupcakes putting on airs. Oh well, they still taste good.

So I guess I will end up alternating between healthier muffin and faux muffin. Worse things happen at sea, I guess. First world problems.

Oh, then, on the bus ride home, the bus driver totally missed my stop. The following is what went down when this happened. I swear this is exactly what was said.

Me : Hey, you missed Eckersley (my stop)!
Bus Driver (BD) : Oh, is that where you wanted to stop?
Me : Uh, yeah, I pulled the stop.
BD : Then why didn’t you stand up?
Me : Because you didn’t stop!
BD : Most people, they come up front when they… (trails off mumbling)
(He pulls over about a block from my stop. I get up to get out. As I pass him I say : )
Me : You know, MOST of the time….
BD : Goodbye, sir.
Me : And scene!

Look, pal, you are obviously sleepy and distracted. Just admit that you missed my stop and apologize for it. Then I will say it’s okay, and everything will end in harmony.

Don’t try to front like I did something wrong. You fucked up, not me. Pulling the stop has been sufficient the thousands of of times I have used the bus before.

Now wake the fuck up, pay attention to your job, and don’t think that just because you get all chummy with your regular customers that this means you can slack off.

He’s just lucky I am too lazy/sensitive to file a complaint.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.