The next three days are going to be trying. Like I said yesterday, I will have three exams, one per day, for three days. Plus that story for my Creative Writing class.

Luckily, after that, things let up, and at the end of it all, there will be a prize : VancouFur.

That’s the local furry convention, and I always go. I can’t even imagine missing it. I always have a great time, and I get to see some of the local furries from Back In The Day that I never see otherwise. And it’s lovely to spend four days (this one starts on Thursday) in a place where all us wacky and adorable furry types get to be ourselves and form a little temporary community of our own.

Speaking of furry communities, I am wishing I had some form of recognition for having founded the local furry community way back in the early 2000s. I was the one who started it all by starting the mailing list that formed the social hub for us local fuzzies to communicate with one another and via which I could organize events.

From there, I lead the group, got the monthly furmeets going, then later added the monthly furry dinnermeets where we could all go out to eat together. I ran that community for about five years before the events got too big and crowded for my anxieties, and I had to bow out and let someone else take over.

And that’s the reason there is a local furry community to support the foundation and running of convention in the first place, he insisted grumpily.

I didn’t worry about recognition for all the years since then because I was not mentally healthy enough to care. But now I do care because I am trying to build a stable core of self-worth and upon that some kind of deep and positive sense of self, and I need all the bricks and mortar I can get in order to do so.

And I don’t exactly have a lot of accomplishments to draw on for that, ya know?

Oh well. I guess founders are often forgotten. The local community has had a lot of turnover since I left it, and there’s barely anyone who has even heard of me left. As far as they know, the local community has always been there. They weren’t in it when it was founded and we were all just getting to know each other. When it was me and like six other local furs. They weren’t there for that first furmeet at the Cactus Club across the street from Metrotown, when I was so anxious about the whole thing that it was like a highly unpleasant drug trip.

I wonder if I should warn my lawyer about the bats.

I have to admit, I am a little nostalgic for those days. Not for the desperate financial situation, but for the community when it was small and manageable and I could go to a furmeet and have a grand old time without my background anxiety rising like the mercury in a thermometer until all I could do was hide out on the balcony until it was over.

I feel anxious just thinking about it. Sad face.

My leadership style was quite laissez-faire, as befits my laid back personality. I firmly believe that communities will grow organically and healthfully if you just provide the framework of organization and leadership for it to grow on, and then tend it carefully and lovingly.

So I only intervened to solve disputes and to decide things that needed deciding. My biggest concern was to make sure that the community stayed open and accepting. When a new person joined the community, my policy was to welcome them into the community at their first furmeet, then leave them alone to find their own space. I had great faith in the community’s ability to draw people in with its happy and accepting vibe, and watched as it worked its magic over and over again.

Someone would come in very shy, defensive, and anxious, and they would be pretty freaked out at first. Maybe their social skills were a tad underdeveloped. I could relate. But over time, they would come to realized they were safe here, and free to join in with the other kids on the playground without fear of bullying or rejection.

And the next thing you know, they are socially blossoming right before my eyes, going from shy and anxious to happy and free and relaxed.

Words cannot possibly describe how proud and pleased I am to have been able to provide that for people. Sometimes, the only way to get what you want is to make it happen yourself, and what I made was the exact kind of community that I had always longer for myself.

And in doing so, rescued a lot of other people in the same situation. Isn’t that amazing? That’s how the world should work, in my honest opinion. Positives building on positives, growing full and strong, until it can make it on its own in the world and doesn’t need you any more.

It’s a lot like raising a child, really. And I am proud of my baby, I really am.

I just wish he’d call home now and then.

All this is going to lead to me rejoining the local community, I think. I will have to choose my events carefully based on social density, so there probably won’t be a lot of regular furmeets in my future unless someone who has a really big place has decided to host.

But if there are smaller events, I could do those. William told me there are furry movie nights, and that might work if the space to attendance ratio is acceptable. And of course, meeting at a restaurant for a chat n’ dine type meeting is fine by my.

Of course, that doesn’t deal with one other problem :

Everyone will be so young!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to faithful reader and all around groovy guy William “spuug” Graham, I now understand syntax diagramming.

Turns out, it actually is linear. You just have to identify the smallest elements of a sentence first (the words and their part of speech, or ‘word class”) then from there look for the smallest phrases that follow the phrase rules for English, then those elements form bigger elements, and eventually, you get to the basic formula for any English sentence, and then you’re done.

Why my professor couldn’t explain it like that I will never know. Perhaps our cognitive styles are just too disparate. And there’s an enormous emotional issue to deal with. As much as I like her, she’s still the authority figure, and I am still the sometimes too smart for his own good student who does not have a history of reacting well to frustration, and I went to crazytown over this business pretty much immediately, which makes it kind of hard to learn.

So she may have explained it to us in exactly that way and I was too messed up emotionally to understand or absorb it. I am relaxed with William, and he had the time and patience to explain it to me in a way that I could understand.

That means the world to me, dear. More than you can ever know. In my life, very few people have been willing to hang in there with me and teach me things I don’t understand and, most importantly, to stick with me till I get it.

So now I stand a fairly good chance of passing that Linguistics exam I have been dreading. Tuesday night, I shall walk into that room and give it my all and, hopefully, pass.

I might even get a C!

This upcoming week is really gonna be a bitch. I have three exams in as many days, plus a short story due on Tuesday (you saw the rough draft here) which needs a major overhaul if it is to be any good at all.

I mean, it’s a rough draft, and as such, it accomplished what it was supposed to do, which was to allow me to get all my ideas about the story out of my head and into text so I can think about the larger issues. I am not at all happy with the pacing of the story as it is right now, and the Ancient Caterpillar’s anger at the Crooked Giant feels like it comes out of nowhere, and overall, the whole thing seems lumpy and unbalanced.

So it’s time to polish that prose! I am actually looking forward to it. Unlike every other time, I was thinking about the editing stage before I even finished the rough draft. I would slap stuff into the rough draft thinking “that’s not great… I will have to fix that when I edit. ” and after that, I started thinking about how I was going to improve the thing for the next draft.

So perhaps the key to keeping me motivated enough to hang in there and edit the damned thing is to simply deny myself the feeling that the thing is done when I stop typing. It sounds quite simple when I put it like that, but trust me, it isn’t from my point of view. If I can get myself to the point where, on a deep emotional level, I know that my first stab at it is likely terrible and will need a lot of editing to be presentable, I will be able to view finishing the first draft as only being the beginning of a long process.

Well, maybe not THAT long. Baby steps and all. At this point, even producing a second draft would be major progress. I have decided that I am through with putting substandard product out into the world. I am a way, way better writer than that. Just getting my thoughts out of my head isn’t enough any more.

Funny as it might sound, I want to make stuff that’s actually good.

In saying this, I am committing to pushing myself to a higher level. I have coasted on my talents for a long time and it’s gotten me nowhere. If I want to even enter the game, I am going to have to put some effort into getting better at my craft.

Raw ability (of which I have loads) is not talent. Raw ability plus acquired skill is talent. Otherwise, you are nothing but unrefined ore, and worth about as much on the open market.

And by you, I of course, as always, mean me.

I think my story has real potential for greatness. It is, admittedly, a very odd and quirky little piece, but I am sure there must be a market for that sort of thing out there somewhere. The important thing is, I feel good about it. It’s something I am proud to have written, even in its current form, and that feels great. It’s certainly one of the most literary things I have ever written, underneath all the quirkiness. Levels of meaning and all that.

So I look forward to digging in and refining the thing till it’s the smooth, crisp, easy prose I want it to be. My goal is nothing less than the sort of deceptively simple seeming prose that gets the hell out of the way of the story and therefore goes down easy and settles deep.

In keeping with that ideal, I should reread “A Stitch In Time” in order to take notes. I am not sure I want my prose to be quite as breathlessly exciting as Madeline L’Engle’s, but that book never fails to draw me in and hook me hard. I just have to know what happens next, and next, and next, and so on.

And I really want to know the secret of that kind of lean, energetic, engrossing prose.

If I could write like that, I would make a million dollars.

Until then, I will keep writing to you nice people.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, in my second favorite White Spot (Richmond Centre),  waiting on my Macaroni. and Cheese (aka Kraft Dinner) Burger, and relaxing.

I am here to treat myself after doing something that was not easy for me : showing up for group study with Luka (who lives on The second floor), one of my two study partners for that group exam in Ethics on Monday.

This was a bit of a hurdle for the ol’ social anxiety, but that wasn’t as big a deal as it might have been due to the reliable unreliability of mass transit. I waited 45 minutes for a 405 bus while four, count’em, FOUR #401 buses went by.

As a result, I was far too aggravated to worry about such trivial things as social anxiety.

And Luka (yes, I think you’ve seen him before) seems like a pretty cool guy. Cute too, but don’t tell them I said that, unless you know he’d be into it, in which case, hell yeah and come back for seconds).

On the way to KPU, the bus driver sang softly in Chinese for the whole trip. I didn’t want to believe it was the bus driver doing it, seeing as that was the person in charge of the ten tons of bus with my favorite me in it. But I looked al around the bus and there was only one other person in tge bus was an East Indian guy who seemed to be asleep.

Or meditating. Hard to tell the difference from afar.

It gets weirder! I have had multiple encounters with a seemingly developmentally challenged dude who sings in Chinese all the time on that very same bus. 

So either that guy was hiding somewhere on the bus, or  that guy now drives the bud .

That doesn’t actually bother me that muvh. After all, odds are that guy is somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I implicitly trust tnose people with anything to do with mass transit.

Honesly, half of the time, all Luka (just don’t ask him what it was) and I did was bitch about the course and the prof. I like the prof, but she seems to have no idea what she is doing. She practically admitted that we were doing a group exam because it gave her 2/3 fewer papers to grade, which is great for HER, and really, isn’t that all that matters?

Because that is what education is all about, right? The teachers?

We spent a whole three hour class on cultural relativism, and another on why religion and/or God  can’t be the basis of morality, but Kant? We barely got thete, let alone actually covered the subject.

Because, ya know, he is only one of the most respected and (sadly) influential thinkers in the history of Western thought, the successor in rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, the guy whose name is on an entire branch of ethics.

But please, let’s belabour every minute point about why cultural relativism is wrong first.

Well, I am done eating, the bill is paid, and I am tired of one finger typing.

Seeya when I get home!

(—)

519 words while noshing at the Spot. Decent.

Had their salted caramel ripple ice cream again. It’s really good. You don’t taste the salt, of course… that would be gross. What you taste is the effect it has on the flavour of the caramel, which is to heighten the sweetness in a rich and very pleasing way, IMHO.

The caramel sauce does tend to freeze into little chewy caramel nuggets in places, but that’s clearly a feature, not a bug. They are quite tasty, and once you know they are there, make the experience more fun.

While talking to Luka (after that you don’t ask why), it occurred to me to wonder exactly what it means to be a philosopher.

I was telling him how, up until the mid 19th century, philosophy was done by scholar for scholars, and that is why it is written in this abstruse and legalistic language. The philosopher expected his rivals to be looking for errors, omissions, and such, and as such they were not worried that said rivals would lose interest in their writing.

Their rivals, unlike us common folk, were motivated by a powerful force : spite.

And that got me thinking about what it means to be a philosopher. It’s certainly more than dusty librarians playing “gotcha” with one another. It’s a trite truth to say it is about a search for the truth, but that doesn’t really explain much. The truths of philosophy often have a lot more to do with the seeker than what is sought. It can’t just be the truth, it has to be the truth in a form that our mortal minds can understand. Even the mightiest of ponderers can only comprehend a tiny fraction of the totality of human existence.

Doesn’t stop me from trying, though.

The act of philosophy is simple : think about things. That is truly all there is to it. Try to figure what is really going on.

But the act of being a philosopher is entirely different. Arguably, you only become a philosopher when you try to put your thoughts into words meant for others, whether it’s in writing or speech. The need to communicate these truths is what makes someone into a philosopher. Otherwise, the person would just sit around and think all day and be content with that.

But that is not how humans operate. Even Nietzsche’s holy hermit Zarathustra felt the need to come down from the mountaintop and share his truths with the people of the world.

So to be a philosopher is to search for novel and important truths to share with the rest of humanity. In that sense, the philosopher is the advanced scout of the mind. They enthusiastically seek out the outer edges of human understanding, and explore past them, hoping, on some level, to come back to the tribe and tell them of the treasures and dangers that lie ahead.

Of course, because we’re human beings too….. it’s not that simple.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got reminded, completely by accident, that I should be working on something or other with two partners for my Ethics class on Monday.

I am pretty sure we are just supposed to get together and study because on Monday, I will be doing a group exam with these guys. Three dudes, one exam handed in, with three names on it.

What a revolting thought.

Seriously. I mean, I am sure the other two dudes are fine guys and decent students, but I sincerely loathe the idea of a group exam. I really do not want to join my destiny with another’s. I have done my own work for my whole life. I would much rather do the exam alone and rise or fall on my own merits.

Even though, in theory, with three of us, we should be able to come up with an exam paper far superior to one we could do on our own. As long as one of us remembers Fact X, we all get the benefit. We should be able to kick the exam’s ass, to be honest.

But I still hate group work. I guess, when you really get down to it, I am a loner by nature. I am not looking to join, collaborate, or be a team player. I want to work on my own. Do my own thing. I’, not misanthropic – I don’t hate people. I don’t consider myself too good to work with others either^[1]. It’s not even that I have a problem with authority.

It’s just that I want to do my own work in my own way. Even when I was an actor in a play, I had my role and I did it on my own, at least in my own mind. I didn’t have to constantly work with and look to others in order to get the job done. If that had been the case… I might have failed as an actor.

That would have been very depressing.

It’s not that I am antisocial. It’s more like I am not totally social. I need my boundaries and I need people to respect them. I need my own little patch of ground where I can work by myself. I am happy to contribute that work to the group effort – that’s not a problem.

But I need to be left alone to do it. That’s non-negotiable.

I suppose I just need to make peace with that. We don’t always get to be the person we want to be. I can’t be super friendly and sociable and easygoing on all things. When push comes to shove, I am a Taurus bull who has to have certain things his own way.

I guess everyone, at some point, has to face the truth about who they can and cannot be. There’s always tension between our social mask and what lies beneath. Between our idea of the best kind of person to be and the person we actually are, and furthermore, what actual options we have for change.

And what things are just the fundamental variables of our character.

The science is fairly firm on the subject. People can change their fundamental character a little bit. But for the most part, you are who you are, and I suppose we are all better off simply accepting them and making the best version of yourself given those constants.

I don’t know why I feel like I should be more social and such than I am or can ever be. Maybe it’s simply because I am so lonely and desperate for connection that I feel, deep down, that I should be maximizing all possibilities for it. Like I am a starving man who can’t afford to be fussy about food.

But that’s not a healthy outlook in this case. It is much healthier to decide who you are and what you can and cannot do and can and cannot be. And that includes exactly how social you really are. Desperation is never attractive (except to very, very bad people) and once you decide what your limits are and that you are perfectly fine on your own and can therefore afford to be choosy, you will stop putting out that desperation vibe and people will naturally find it easier to get close to you. It will also help you be more relaxed in social situations, and therefore more open to things like social cues and the group vibe, making it easier to stay connected.

I am working on that. There is still a lot of emotional noise that rises up and cuts me off from others like a wall of static and leaves me isolated in the middle of the group. It even rears its ugly head with my friends now and then. It’s insidious because as a response to social nervousness, it works, in that it does actually cut off the social stimulation that is causing the problem.

But in a really terrible way. It’s the definition of maladaptive. All that emotional noise makes it impossible for me to think and whatever I say is going to come out as strange and alienating as a result. If I could just stay loose and stay happy, I would be able to use my charm and charisma to get by, instead of sending these mixed signals of friendliness and alienation at the same time.

And of course, most of the noise in my head when I am having a social freakout is just plain wrong. People don’t hate me and wish I would just go away already. The moment might be awkward, but awkwardness is not the worst thing in the universe. It can be overcome. It’s like broadcasting : the worst thing you can do is stop dead. No matter what mistake you make, just keep going like nothing happened.

It’s one thing to be sensitive. That’s a good thing, it keeps you tuned in to other people’s feelings.

But when your mind is lying and given you false emotional information, that’s not sensitivity.

That’s insanity. And that’s not good at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s blog entry soundtrack :

Another day, another battle with ennui and depression.

I scored one significant victory today : I now have an appointment for an eye exam. Though I am not sure I will go. I will explain.

See, first I called Robertson Optical, who are just a block and a half (maybe two thirds) from here. I had passed them many times and a search for the nearest optometrist’s office through Google confirmed that they were the closest to me.

So I called them up. but it turns out they are not optometrists, they are opticians. They make the glasses but they don’t do the testing. I am so accustomed to finding those in the same place that it never occurred to me that they could be separate. But of course they can.

The sexyily deep-voiced fellow was nice enough to give me the number of a Doctor Ho, who does most of the exam work for them. I called him up, and I gave him a bunch of my personal info, then he had to go call MRH (the people who handle the claims for disabled people like myself), then get back to me.

He said that MRH would only cover $46 of the exam and I would have to pay the remaining $73. I shrugged and agreed to that, because I do have the money. But now I am starting to wonder WTF is up with that. I have never had to pay before. I think perhaps the problem is that before, at places like Pacific Eye Doctors and Eye Station, the eye exam and the glasses were more of a package deal. Free eye exam with every pair of glasses type thing.

So now I am wondering if I should go back to them and save the $73, or just go to my appointment tomorrow with Doctor Ho and charge the extra money to the education fund (AKA my student loan money). If there is a chance that I will get better service and more personal care from an optometrist who is NOT trying to sell me a pair of glasses, it will be worth it.

I just don’t want to leave with a prescription that I will also have to pay for myself. I know for a fact that my plan via disability covers a new pair of glasses and an eye exam every two years and it has been WAY more than two years since my last one.

My Kwantlen extended insurance plan adds a little more money to the pot as well.

So I dunno. I might just go back to one of the big places, who might be rude but they seem to grasp how these things work, at least. This Doctor Ho dude seems to have no idea, but then again, he was answering his own phone. Maybe his secretary couldn’t make it in that day, and she’s the one who handles that kind of thing for him.

The sexy voice guy at Robertson Optical said they have been dealing with Doctor Ho for seventeen years. The guy I talked to on the phone sounded to me like seventeen years ago, he was like…. seven. But that is just a symptom of age, or so I am told.

I will probably just go to the appointment and pay up. Path of least resistance and all that. And it’s not like I have big plans for most of the money.

I wonder if I should have told them that he will need to do the full battery of tests on me, not just the standard eye test. Well, I told him I hadn’t been in for an exam in five years and that I am both diabetic and disabled. I am sure he can fill in the blanks.

And if not, he’s in Richmond Centre, so it’s not like I would have to haul my ass all over God’s Green Earth in order to go there more than once. It’s just two blocks away.

Other than eye stuff, not much going on today. I ordered in some Pizza Hut for supper. I needed it as a mood picker-upper. Something to make my days less bleak and repetitive and deadly. It’s an expensive form of medication, but I am fighting for my soul here.

What I am trying to avoid is a slump into depression and listless discontent. There are things I want to get done in my time off school (most of which are school things) and if I can get those done, it will be a huge victory in the battle against my own bullshit and show me I can stand up to that heavy wet gravity pulling me down instead of just letting it take me over because it’s easier.

Fuck easier. I want challenge. My life needs a lot more texture, more roughage. And something for me to push against.

The oxen need the plow, else what will they do with all that strength?

So I am doing what I can to keep busy with things which have some purpose. And the homework I have to get done will help…. once I figure out what it is.

I am pretty sure I have to do my short story for Creative Writing before the next class on March 1. That is, of course, not a problem. In theory, I could totally cheat and take an existing short story (I have 40), give it a brisk edit, and submit that. How would she know?

But I won’t, because I have too much pride and too deep a need to be original. Not to the point of being driven to write something unlike anything anyone has done before (I am no formalist), but everything I do has to be both fresh and most importantly, all me.

So I will likely whip up something fresh and charming and harmless for the prof, and be done with it.

There’s probably other stuff too. I guess I should look that up.

But not right now. Right now…. I need to go lay down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am really not feeling the words coming right now. But time marches on.

Starting to feel the limp yet insidious tentacles of ennui slipping into my mind. Time is starting to seem pointless and vague. I don’t have anything in particular to do with my time and it is making me feel withdrawn and depressed. I want to fight it, and it’s not that I don’t know what to do. I know the exact cure : find things to do. Get caught up on homework, assignments, studying. Shoot some kind of video for the first time since mid-September. Maybe make some music. My options are manifold.

The problem is that I don’t want to do anything. My motivation has drained away and that leaves me without anything to inspire me into action. None of those activities actually appeal to me, and so getting back in the swing of doing stuff outside my ever-so-tempting puddle life seems like a distant and unreachable goal.

There has to be a force beyond motivation I can call on to pull me out of this ditch. Something besides sheer willpower. I am willing to use that if the stakes are high enough, but it feels like the wrong solution. I don’t think I have it in me to become one of those self-made hardcore “sheer force of will” kinds of people.

And even if I do have it in me…. I fear what in me I would have to sacrifice in order to make that transformation. I have said before that I am willing to sacrifice whatever I have to in order to be a freer, happier me, but that’s a tad naive. I am certainly not thinking of my tenderest, most innocent and vulnerable bits when I make that statement.

I am not thinking about the parts of me that my personality is structured to protect.

Perhaps I should be, though. Perhaps those are exactly the parts of me that are keeping me from growing up and becoming whole and sane. But if that is true, what will happen if I get rid of them? Sacrifice them on the altar of recovery? Won’t the whole thing come crumbling down as all my mental machinery is left without purpose, focus, or goal?

Maybe not. Maybe all that will happen is that the machine can finally start working properly again now that the key blockages have been removed.

I do know that for whatever reason, I feel very weak right now. I don’t think it’s a blood sugar thing. I had a decent supper a couple of hours ago. Maybe it’s blood oxygen…. I did lay down for a little while after supper. Maybe all I really need is a few deep, cleansing breaths in order to get my blood OX back up to normal after a bout with sleep apnea.

Yeah, about that. I should resolve that one way or the other, and soon. Either I need to try the thing again in order to see if that one bad night was a fluke or the machine has a real problem, or I need to skip that and take the damned thing in to my rep Marielle to see if anything is wrong with it sans testing.

Right now, all I am doing is going on with untreated sleep apnea, and that sucks. I can feel the difference between now and pre-incident and it is palpable. So I want to get back on that horse in one way or another ASAP. Something to get done while I have a week off.

Also eye testing. I haven’t been tested in five years and I am supposed to get it checked twice a year. I know I need a stronger prescription. The world has gotten a lot squintier over the last few years and screen glare and such are a bigger problem every day. And sometimes I feel this pressure in my eyes that really bothers me.

So I am going to want both a regular eye exam and the glaucoma “air puff” test. That one is annoying, but better annoyed then blind because your eyes exploded anyhow.

I am hoping that my KPU supplemental medical insurance covers whatever my disability MSP plan does not so I will not be relegated to bargain-bin frames and good-enough lenses. It would be nice, in fact, if I could get an anti-screen-glare coating as well, and maybe some prescription sunglasses for when summer comes around.

And hey, as long as I am asking, it would be nice to be treated with respect instead of contempt by the fucking opticians and optometrists too. They really don’t like seeing us welfare cases come in. They can’t make as much money on us, and it can take a while for the government to pay them.

Hopefully, with school insurance backing me up financially and the designation “student” backing me up socially, I can at least avoid the long, heavy sigh from the person behind the counter before they listlessly vaguely point at things then pointedly ignore me.

I am not making any of that up. That is how I have been treated in the past and it really hurts, especially for someone who is already a clinically depressed person with health issues and low self-esteem.

Oh well, at least this time, I will know what I am up against and will be ready to go in with a firm “smile and confront” attitude. For example :

Me : Hi! I would like to make an appointment for an eye exam.
Person Behind Counter (PBC) : Certainly. Do you have any kind of insurance?
Me : Sure, I am on provincial disability.
PBC : *big long sigh*
Me (still bright, friendly, and non-aggressive) : I’m sorry, is there a problem with that?

Then they have to either come right out and tell me they hate people on social assistance, or say there is no problem, smarten up, and treat me with respect.

I am betting on the second one, although the first would provide me with an entertaining verbal battle I know I can’t lose, at least.

I guess I’ve figured out why I have been putting it off for so long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well okay, the afternoon before reading week.

Still have no idea what I will do to fill my time. But I am unconcerned about it. I am confident that I will find something or other to do. No need for me to decide it all ahead of time. That only leads to me getting all uptight about it, and ignoring my plans because I can’t handle the pressure, and then feeling guilty about not doing them and beating myself up for being a lazy loser, and blah blah blah.

Fuck it. The days will be whatever suits me at the time. I have plans, but that’s all they are…. plans. Plans can change. They’re not moral obligations if the only person involved is yourself. To repeat a tired but still valid refrain, what matters is what I want to do, not what I ought to do.

During last Thursday’s therapy, the subject of self-worth, self-esteem, and all that came up, and I told my therapist that I don’t like thinking in those terms. That I prefer to leave those values blank. Nothing but big question marks.

And as I was trying to explain this to him, I figured out why that is. It’s because those are evaluative terms, and in order to preserve myself from my out of control superego, I have to escape the evaluative mode entirely. And that means the neutrality of blankness. No judgment in either direction, no values entered, no analysis performed. I have to get away from my powerful but deeply corrupted meta-consciousness and get to a place where I can just be myself, warm and whole and not concerned with constant self-dissection.

It’s a hard habit to break, this brutal self-analysis. It’s a habit that runs very deep in my mind, on a very basic level of consciousness. I have been really focusing on creating powerful positive self-talk to counter the automatic self-negation that has ruled the roost for so long. I have been catching myself in the act of self-destruction and pushing back hard.

When I make some minor mistake, I’ve been telling myself that I am okay, I am just fine, I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything anyone else hasn’t done or never does, and that by and large, I do a fine job of living my life.

And it’s working. So far so good. It will take a lot of emotional muscle to push back against the inner voice that tells me I am incompetent in all things and pathetic and so on. But I have never lacked that kind of muscle. When I am determined to do something, I can always find the strength.

The real struggle will be against the escapist element of thinking of oneself as incompetent. It makes for a great excuse not to try, to give up the instant you meet resistance, to flee from challenge and crawl back into my hidey-hole, curl up with my safe distractions, and go back to pretending the big mean world doesn’t exist.

All to escape the paralyzing terror that comes when I try to do things. That voice inside that says don’t bother, you will just makes things worse, just stay out of the way and wait is very old and very strong and backed up by certain issues I have with my eye-hand coordination, my sense of balance, and so forth.

But none of my physical problems make it impossible for me to do things properly. It just makes it harder to learn to do it. I think the real problem is that I give up trying to teach myself to do things as fast (or faster) than others gave up trying to teach them to me in the past. I have never had someone firm and patient enough to stick with me for as long as it takes for me to learn something.

They made the shortsighted decision that it was easier to just do it themselves. So I never learned to do stuff.

I want to be a better parent than that to myself. Patient, understanding, and above all, persistent. And very firm without being severe about it. I need the firmness because it helps me to calm down and focus on the task and learning it in an open and accepting way, instead of getting freaked out and eager to escape.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the nervousness of the un-led. How people get nervous and agitated if there isn’t some force, internal or external, that reassures them that someone or something above them has everything under control and they can go back to just worrying about their own problems now.

I think the rise of democracy and consumer culture has had the unintended effect of leaving us all without concrete leadership. By taking out the (quite awful) power structure and maximizing individual autonomy, we inadvertently created a large leadership deficit.

We made the mistake of thinking that, because we no longer needed the existing forms of leadership, we didn’t need leadership at all. And this has proved to be a correct assumption, but only up to a point. We still have the same hierarchical instincts of any socially cooperative advanced mammal, and that means we all possess a need for a leader to look to for assurance and a calm, steadying hand.

I think conservatives under this truth in a dim and shadowy way. That’s why they are always looking for firm, decisive leadership, often to the point of completely ignoring what said leadership actually does in favour of getting the feeling of warmth and security they so badly need by believing in it.

And this is why liberalism just doesn’t do it for some people because liberals value individuality (and their own self-image as nice, gentle people) too much to dominate people even a little. That’s why they can’t project leadership and why conservatives tend to go berserk when they are in charge because conservatives need someone to dominate them into feeling secure and will act out till they get it.

I could go on and on, but I will leave that for tomorrow’s blog entry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I really can’t stand Hillary Clinton.

I didn’t want to start hating her again, like I did when she was up against Obama. I wanted to maintain the equilibrium and continue to think that there were two viable, decent candidates for the Democratic nomination and I just happened to like Bernie Sanders more.

But just like with Obama, as the race goes on, Hillary’s true nature – that of a soulless shrew with no moral center who has naked ambition where her heart should be – shows, and I end up hating her goddamned guts and wishing she would shrivel up and blow away already.

And that goes for her supporters as well. I remember how they attacked Obama by calling him “an uneducated black man” when the dude went to Harvard and graduated with honors. That’s just about as educated as you can get. Gee, ladies…. racist much?

And now you have Madeline Albright, someone I had a lot of respect for, trotting out her “there’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women” line in support of Hillary, thus implying that women who don’t support Hillary are going to Hell. Gee, Maddie, I thought us liberals were against all that fire, brimstone, and guilt stuff.

So I guess either we liberals are for that kind of thing now…. or you’ve stopped being a liberal.

But far far worse was someone I idolized, Gloria Steinem, saying that the young female supporters of Bernie Sanders are only going to his rallies to meet boys.

That hurt so bad. It’s such an ignorant, thoughtless, and insulting comment that it would be bad enough coming from anyone, but to hear it from someone I considered to be a wise and intelligent leader and my favorite feminist EVER was like a blow to the heart. With that offhand comment, she attacked millions of young American women, suggesting they have no actual political agency and no real convictions, they just do what their hormones tell them to do.

That is the exact opposite of feminism and it wounds me deep to see someone I think of as one of the founders of modern feminism as well as one of its brightest and most cogent articulaters spout such venomous nonsense into the political discourse of modern liberalism.

That alone is probably the biggest factor in why my disdain for Hillary has turned into burning hatred. I am incapable of hating Steinem. But I can hate the woman whose ambition led to her trying to collect feminist endorsements in order to buttress her entirely undemocratic and intellectually poisonous claim that women should vote for her just because she’s a woman.

By that logic, every Jew should vote for Bernie. Right Hillary?

At least I can take some comfort from the fact that there is no way this sort of thing can actually hurt Bernie’s chances. In fact, they only strengthen them, because just like with Obama, Hillary is up against someone with absolutely unimpeachable integrity, and it is clearly driving her nuts because she had no real mud to fling at him so whatever she concocts bounces right back at her without leaving a mark on Bernie Sanders, who, like Hillary’s husband Bill so long ago, just has to stand there and keep cool and let his attackers damn themselves with their open hostility and naked agenda.

This is doubly true because Bernie refuses to say a single bad thing about Hillary. That must be driving her up a wall and down again.

I can’t help feeling like the Hillary versus Bernie struggle has really illustrated the split between real liberals and the liberal-ish. Everything Bernie stands for is rock solid liberalism and there is no good reason for any real liberal to support Hillary over him. At this point, her entire platform is basically “um, same thing as Bernie, but with a vagina?”. She not only has no personal dirt to dig up and fling at him, she can’t argue against him on policy either. She knows that just won’t fly. His platform is just too popular. Everything he promises would genuinely make the USA a better place to live (and, frankly, finally bring them up to par with the rest of the developed world) and is favored by a majority of Americans of all political stripes.

She can’t argue against it without drawing even more attention to the fact that she is way too cozy with the one percent. That’s why she refuses to release video or transcripts of any of the talks she gave to behemoths of evil like Goldman Sachs over the years. People who were at one of them said she praised Goldman Sachs to the high heavens for all the good work they do, practically sucking their collective cocks for a cool quarter million bucks.

Talk about a happy ending…. or should I say, money shot.

So it was hilarious in a tragic way that she responded to questions about these talks by saying she would reveal all “just as soon as all the other candidates did, including Senator Sanders”.

To which Bernie replied by instantly releasing a full transcript of a talk he did, as well as his fee, which was $500, which he gave to charity.

Take that, you bile spewing harpy. I am sure you tell yourself that everyone who doesn’t like you is a sexist Republican who hates babies and kicks puppies, but the truth is, there are a lot of people who see through your political charade and see that you are a horrible person with no true convictions, just an all-consuming ambition and a willingness, even an eagerness, to degrade, dismember, and destroy anyone who gets in her way.

What we need are people who can get close to her via town hall events and press conferences to ask her pertinent and seemingly harmless questions designed to provoke her well documented mean streak by questioning her integrity. All it would take is one moment where her eyes blaze with fury at the questioner and she looks like she wants to eat them alive to sink her chances forever.

And the best part is, she would know she had done it to herself.

I will talk to you nice people against tomorrow.

Favorite White Spot. Favorite table. Let’s do this.

Good gravy, am I hungry. Been undereating again. It is always a product of my struggle with eating when I have no appetite.

The part of me that knows I have to eat or suffer the consequences gets corrupted by the mindless resistance to eating sans appetite saying “Well okay, we will eat, but surely we don’t have to eat as much as usual, right? We eat too much anyhow. And hey, we can wait a little longer to eat…you know, just long enough that you will get involved in something and forget?”

And the next thing I know,  my blood sugar is dangerously low because I haven’t eaten in gen hours and I feel like an idiot.

I have a fascinating meeting of accents happening at a nearby table. We have a young black guy with a deep American Black accent (low on consonants, high on extremely articulated dipthongs) meeting a British lady in her fifties with a Pre-chav working class London accent.

And I think they are on a first date. How cool is that?

I have never heard either accent live and in the wild, so to speak, so I cannot help eavesdropping. My ear automatically orients on the unusual and fascinating accents, so I cannot help but hear snatches of their conversation.

Black dude is a band that does Motown covers. Bitchin’. I was just tested on that earlier today.

Yes, today was test day in History of Popular Music. And of course, I knew it would be today, but of course, I forgot, so of course, I did not study.

And that will cost me marks. I can only hope that whatever angels of luck and test brightness that got me through the multiple choice Psychology exams last semester were with me today.

I am out and about today in order to cash my cheque. (OMG, you think. So that is what the title is about! What a clever writer.)

Normally, my cheque arrives Wednesday and I cash it Thursday,. But this month, it didn’t show up til today, Friday. So I decided that I would go out and get it cashed all by myself.

You know, because I’m a big boy now.

Black dude is having a culture issue with the White Spot menu and their definition of “pork chops” as opposed to what he expects. He has my sympathy. I had trouble with West Coast menus at first too.

Well, my meal is over, and I am tired of typing with one finger.  Seeya when I get home.

(–)

Home now. Hmmm, only 433 words. Felt like a lot more. Damned one finger typing.

Anyhow. Black dude.

The problem was that, where he comes from, pork chops are cooked a certain away and come smothered in fried onions. The kind White Spot makes are cooked some weird trendy way and come with sauteed onions. So I am thinking this poor guy ordered the one thing on the menu that looked familiar to him, and it turned out to be totally weird and, to him, inedible.

The White Spot people were totally cool about it, though. They totally comped him.

He will have to work through it like I did. At first it was a culture shock, then I merely resented it, then I learned to read the menu with an eye toward figuring out what the “normal” food was and what to ask the server if you are afraid that it might be booby-trapped with weirdness.

Of course, I am a sophisticated West Coast diner now. I even try entirely new things sometimes, which for me is a big deal, as I have been a conservative eater my whole life.

It’s weird, though, that I adapted to Mexican food pretty much instantly when I lived in Silly Con Valley, way before I ever set foot in White Spot. I suppose that might have been because it was all entirely new to me, so I had no expectations of how it was supposed to be.

Whereas the menus up here in the GVRD are full of that “comfort food with a twist” type things that sound like you will like them but they add some weird thing to it and ruin it.

In an odd way, it makes me want to open an Acadian food restaurant here in the GVRD, just so I will be the one familiar with the cuisine and everyone else will be all “WTF is a fricot?”.

It’s chicken soup….. WITH A TWIST!

It’s only just starting to sink in now that I have no class next week. I dunno what the fug I am going to do with all that time. I know I will finally do that deep dive into my course descriptions and try to program as much as I possibly can into my calendar, along with a ton of reminders to make SURE I don’t forget to do and/or study things.

But that’s like…. three hours work, max. The rest of the time? Dunno.

Well, there’s always video games. I got this slick new computer just waiting to play some current-generation games like Fallout 4. (I will have to catch up on 3 too. ) But contemplating a week of doing nothing but wasting my life and my potential on video games depresses me greatly.

So I dunno. Maybe I will conceive of some sort of fun project for me to work on. Or maybe I will finally get around to buying some Splenda and flour and getting back into baking. Or maybe I will go completely insane and macrame myself a twenty foot maroon cocoon and live inside it forever and ever and ever.

Or maybe I will just vegetate through the week like I vegetated through most of my adult life. Blogging and oblivion and waiting for the next thing to happen.

Or maybe I will figure out how to rescue myself from the brutal, biased butchery of my inner accountant who destroys my love before it can be born.

It could happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.