Background music for today’s blog entry :

Holy crap, MC 900 looks so young in that video!

Man, I’m old.

So today was Therapy Thursday, and that went well, in that we got into some really deep shit. The deeper the better, as far as I am concerned. If the answers lay at the surface, I would have cured myself years ago. I go to therapy in order to have someone help me access deeper layers of my psyche that my manic monkey brain.

I told him all about how shit went down last Tuesday night. Kind of therapeutically relevant. It took a few tries to get him to realize that I was talking about something very serious. Serious, as in feeling “not safe” in the very specific way that only people who have been suicidal (and those who try to help them) understand.

Don’t worry, folks, I am okay now, more or less. I’m safe.

The killer I referred to in the title of this blog entry (I refuse to call them ‘blogs’, because that’s stupid) is the assassin inside me who kills my hope, self-esteem, confidence, and worth before it can ever take hold. It’s that ruthless entity of the mind which tells me that I can’t do anything right – that literally everything I do, I am doing it wrong – and that stabs me in the back with an icicle of harsh judgment for the smallest of mistakes, and makes my daily life one of torment and terror and a constant anxiety that varies in intensity but never truly goes away.

Unless, of course, I stay in my playpen of media and food and hanging with the fuzzies. In that tiny little world, I am safe from this demon, more or less. After all, if you don’t struggle against the bonds, they won’t hurt you! Well, not as much, anyhow. The more I push at the bars of my cage, the more the demon beats me back and tells me to behave.

It’s constant, brutal self-judgment, and it’s got to stop.

I also told my therapist about my anger paradox : I refuse to take it out on anyone else, and I know I want to stop taking it out on myself, so where is it supposed to go?

And guess what? He didn’t know either. Not that I expected him to know, really, but some sort of suggestion would have been nice. But no, I have set up an irresolvable paradox within myself. Without the unconscious mechanism of irritability to express and externalize my anger, there is no middle ground between taking it out on myself and taking it out on others.

It’s not like I can choose to let myself become cranky and then pretend I didn’t “mean” to hurt people with my anger. Other people might have that option, but as in much of life, I know too much. I know that choosing to put yourself in a position where you know you will hurt people, it’s exactly the same as choosing to hurt people directly. And I won’t do that.

I vowed never to take my bad mood out on others. That’s what my father did and what I swore I would never do. I was very young when I swore that oath, but that only makes it all the more powerful. My entire personality is structured around not letting that happen.

That means I put a very high (perhaps too high) value on self-control. If someone can’t control themselves, they should stay the fuck away from people until they learn to do it. Hurting others by lashing oput at them just because you’re in a shitty mood is absolutely unacceptable to me. Especially if they are people you claim to love.

It should be like dogs. If you keep biting people, we’ll make you wear a muzzle.

But at the same time, I recognize that there are problems with such an absolutist attitude, and that it leaves very little room for people to simply be human. Such harsh absolutes are almost never healthy for the people subject to its rule.

For one thing, it assumes that to express anger around people in any way is to hurt them. And that only works if you assume that everyone is as sensitive as you are, times ten. There’s probably forms of irritability that would seem harmless to the world but which would do me a hell of a lot of good.

I think that’s why part of me was actually reveling in how depressed I was Tuesday and was actually sad that it had to end. As depressed as I was, I was actually expressing emotion and reducing the intense pressure of my vast and deep vault of suppressed emotion.

And that felt so good that I never wanted it to end. I wanted it all to burn.

(EXTREME GROSSNESS ALERT! SCATOLOGY AHEAD! SKIP NEXT PARAGRAPH TO AVOID!)

So help me God, it was like taking a huge, hot, nasty shit when you have been sick for a while. It may involve deep, gut-wrenching, searing pain…. but it feels so good to get all that nasty stuff out of you that it leaves you kind of wishing it would keep going till you are completely empty, so you can start over.

(NOTE : It is never good to be totally empty if your bowels are not done freaking out. Ever had the dry heaves? It’s almost as bad from the other end. )

I wish I could take control of this process of catharsis. I wish it didn’t take external events to force the emotions out of me. But as I am increasingly aware, anger to me is like sex is to people raised in traditional religious homes. It’s there, and I don’t deny that I have it, but I can’t express it, handle it, or even look it in the face.

I just go on pretending like nothing is wrong and acting like I can keep this up forever.

But I can’t.

Not if I want to be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, the fox says, “What assignment?”

Yuppie. I spaced out on another assignment, this time for my History of Canada After 1867 class. I was supposed to “hand in” (read : email…clearly. a vocabulary update is needed) my obituary assignment today and I totally forgot.

This shit keeps happening. I just cannot assemble my effluvia. Like I have said more than once before, when school ends, I turn back into a puddle, and all thoughts of homework and assignments fly out of my mind in the pursuit of more time acting like a kid.

It’s part of my youthful appeal.

So it is not a matter of solutions. The solutions are obvious. Fill a calendar slash reminder program with every assignment from every syllabus (sorry, “course description”) and set it to remind the crap out of me till I do whatever will be due soon.

But that would require growing up, which is the real problem. Holding myself accountable. Thinking about the future in concrete terms. Stop ignoring things until they become a problem. Give up the whole “oops, I am so absentminded!” routine.

Yes, I am absentminded. But there are a plethora of tools at my disposal to overcome it. And because I know this, absentmindedness is a choice.

As is not wanting to grow up and have to become a real little boy. Much less an actual adult.

Dude near me is talking on the phone with his mouth full. Gross.

(—)

Back home now. The previous stuff was typed while I was waiting for my bus.

Learned some very cool shit about Canadians in World War II today. Not only did Canada liberate Holland, but before that, they were already heroes to the Dutch.

The Nazis, because pricks and not actually nearly as efficient as they liked to think, didn’t feed the Dutch. They invaded, took everything they could get their hands on and exported it to support the Nazi war machine, and kicked the Dutch off their own farms so they could take them over and use them to feed Nazi soldiers.

So the Dutch were starving, especially in West Holland, which was the most urban part of Holland, and as we all know, cities, unlike farms, are not self-sustaining.

This all was building to be a very heavy duty starvation event. So the Canadians organized a program of food drops, where Allied bombers dropped food packages to the Dutch. Imagine, food from the sky, like manna from heaven.

But it wasn’t enough, especially for West Holland. So the Canadians did something that I feel only Canadians could have done at the time and that I think serves as a shining example of just what it is about this nation that makes us great :

They negotiated with the Nazis.

They struck a deal with the Nazis that cleared one very specific route through Holland allowing Canadian trucks to travel through Nazi-occupied Holland and bring food to the starving Dutch. ^[1] Soon, the Canadians were not just bringing food, they were setting up “feeding stations” (like soup kitchens) to feed the Dutch in the most direct and effective way possible. They even had soldiers with food go door to door looking for people who were too weak from hunger to make it to the feeding stations.

And in order to do they, they had to overcome stiff resistance from the Americans and the British, who refused to allocate any resources for the mission. All they said was “We can best help the people of Holland by defeating Hitler.”

Which was obviously bullshit, because in order to help a people, they have to be alive to be helped!

That’s why it took Canada…. sweet little Canada, the little guy with a heart of gold – to see past the war, past the sides, past team-think, to address the humanitarian crisis in Holland instead of thinking of everything in terms of battles and war.

That’s like, the most inspirational thing ever for my Canadian heart. We were the only ones who knew that people were more important than total war. We were the ones with both the perspective and the moral standing to sit down with the Nazis in the middle of World War II and hammer out a way to save millions of Dutch lives. We were the ones who wanted to save people more than anything else. We were the ones with the true heroism to ignore glory, victory, and treasure and concentrate on what really mattered : saving human lives.

Even the fact that we were willing to design and implement this system of food and feeding stations on the go, and that our soldiers didn’t think it weird that they were being asked to look for starving people instead of, ya know, killing.

That’s the spirit that makes Canada the peacekeepers everyone trusts. It’s what makes our armed forces different from those of other countries. And it’s that spirit that makes this the country unique, special, and amazing force for good in the world that it is.

Damn, I wish I had learned this stuff for Canada Day! I have never had a clearer understanding of what the Canadian spirit, and Canadian identity, is all about. I feel such pride.

Quiet, heartfelt, reserved pride, as befits a Canadian.

Oh, one last thing : there is a kid in my Canadian History class who looks exactly like an extra from a 60’s Godzilla movie. Right down to the sideburns. It’s amazing. He would not look out of place sitting at Yoko Ono’s knee at one of her groovy poetry readings. Or being slightly too into it at a Rolling Stones concert circa Altamont.

Time for me to stop gabbing at you nice folks and get working on that obituary assignment.

Step one…. kill somebody. Makes sense….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I still do not get it.

I am here in Lunguistics and I am more lost than ever. Everyone else gets it just fine, but I am totally at sea, I feel like I am in Hell.

I don’t feel very safe right now. Hopefully talking to you people will help.

I have so much frustration,  rage, and depression right now. I cannot work my way free of them. The further I go, the deeper I get, and the deeper I get, the wirse I feel. It is raking all my willpower to sit here and type instead of just oacking up and leaving, never to return.

With or without doung something very crazy, like screaming as loud as I can while throwing my desk into the ceilubg as hard as I can.

Nobody here deserves that. Good thing for them I care about that kind of thing. Because I want to do it, just to externalize Howci feel right now. I feel crazy and burning and poisoned and wrong. I feel like I am going crazy. Crazy crazy crazy.

(—)

Home now. Who gives a shit.

In hindsight, I wish I had left class the moment things started going really bad inside me. I was a fool to stay. The longer I sat there, burning with frustration and disappointment, the more depressed I got. Right now I am feeling really fucking dark and ready to tear someone’s fucking head off if it would only take the fire away.

But another part of me likes this. It loves to burn, it wants to burn. It wants to burn as hot and bright as possible, until the whole world burns with it in a glorious blaze of demonic flame.

Traditionally, that would be the part I should be afraid of. But it kind of has a point, in its own mad way. I have a lot of dead wood inside me that needs to burn. Only when the last of it is gone can I be reborn as something pure and healthy and free.

That’s what forest fires are for.

And the thing is, I refuse to take my anger out on anyone else, and I am not supposed to take it out on myself, so what the fuck else am I supposed to do with it? There is no other option. Stupid Pollyanic therapists and pop therapy types will tell me that I shoukld go chop firewood or beat up a pillow or some shit, but that is bullshit through and through. That might work for neurotic housewives and blonde princesses with daddy issues, but here in the real world, the real dark scary fucking world, that shit won’t cut it.

Anger means someone has to pay. It’s me or them. Inanimate objects don’t count. None of them have caused me this kind of pain, and yet I can’t blame anyone else because it’s me who can’t understand something everyone else in the class, including the dumb ones (there’s always a few), seems to understand just fine.

I talked with the prof twice during class. Once during an exercise and once during the break. And it got me nowhere. I can’t keep all these rules and relationships straight in my head, and if I can’t do that, it all dissolves into chaos and quandary at the slightest touch. I understands parts, but without understanding it as a whole, the parts are meaningless to me.

It’s like trying to figure out what a car looks like purely from a pile of parts. Each part could be labeled with exactly what it does and what connects to it, but without a picture of a car, you have no idea what the fuck any of it is all about.

I asked the prof, “Is it possible to condense this into a series of steps?”
She paused, then said “I believe that is what I have been trying to do…. ”
Then I said “I don’t think so. If that is true, you haven’t taught that list yet. ”
She said “I think I have…. ”
And I said “Is that so? Okay, then WRITE THAT LIST. Step one, step two, step three….. write it. ”

And of course, she couldn’t, because the process is not that linear. It’s two-dimensional, and that’s one dimension too many for me. I have never been able to visualize information like that. For a creative person, I have an extremely linear mind, and this syntax tree bullshit is very much nonlinear.

This is the shit I have to put up with.

And I am afraid that if there is not a method to it, I can’t do it. There’s too many rules, too many variables, too much ambiguity. Too many steps skipped by people who don’t know they are skipping them and therefore can’t answer when I ask them how they knew that.

It’s like trying to learn drawing from a book. It doesn’t fucking work.

As I left, I told the prof, “If you see me for the exam on March 1, it means I figured it out. If you don’t, it’s not your fault.”

And it isn’t. She has done her best to explain it to me. But she doesn’t (maybe can’t) grasp why her explanations don’t work. They all involve explaining a tiny piece of the puzzle without shedding any light on the whole. I am expected to be able to fill that in myself, and I just can’t.

I had no idea studying linguistics would be like that. I figured it would be somewhere between an English course and a science course. But it isn’t. It’s more like a computer programming course that is all the more confusing for being based on real English.

I still might drop the course. I don’t want to do it. It’s not like I could replace it. Any course I joined would be six weeks in just like Linguistics is, and I would never catch up. And that assumes there’s any unfilled slots. Seems doubtful.

The teacher told me that the next section, sounds, does not build on syntax. So I might do fine on the rest. But syntax is 25 percent of the grade and I understand only a third of it. So I would be facing a very steep uphill climb to pass, seeing as I haveb’t been doing that great so far either.

Oh, and for the record, I made sure to tell her that while I seemed very hostile, it was just that I was very frustrated. And she said she understood.

I guess that’s it for now. I guess I feel better, but I am far from feeling good.

I honestly don’t know what comes next.

I will talk to you nice and extremely indulgent people later.

I think I am finally beginning to understand that syntax tree business from Linguistics that was shutting down my brain last week.

It’s just a matter of beating my head against the problem until my brain is forced to come up with the pieces of the puzzle necessary for me to understand the picture.

Like I said before, that kind of thinking does not come naturally to me. I can usually comprehend the whole instantly and then understand the parts in relation to that whole. That has taken me a long way in nearly every subject I have ever taken in school.

Idea are easy. Details are hard.

This video is helping me a lot :

But clearly, that’s not going to happen here, so all I can do is keep trying to grasp what is going on (and what is keeping me from getting it) and let my mind solve the problem piecemeal. Hopefully, if I keep at it tonight and tomorrow before class, I will understand it well enough to survive tomorrow night’s class.

After that, I won’t have another class until Reading Week is over. So I will have two weeks to figure it out.

Ah, Reading Week. It means that I don’t have a single class between Feb 20 (Saturday) and Feb 28 (the next Sunday). It says something about how stressed out I am this semester that I am actually looking forward to it as a time to catch up as opposed to dreading it as a time when my life will lose structure and purpose.

And the thing is, I am perfectly capable of ending the stress just by taking the time and effort to get my life organized and develop just a little more self-discipline when it comes to entering assignments and things into a central calendar-type program so, at a glance, I could know what is due when, and plan accordingly.

It’s a special kinda tragedy to be able to know exactly what you should do but be seemingly incapable of doing it.

I guess I need all the time in Useless Mode that I can get and to hell with anything that makes me give up even ten minutes of it. Or at least that’s what I think I need. I can keep myself together for long enough to go to class and that’s about it. Anything else, and I am lost in that magic amusement park and not looking to escape.

This is a problem. If I want to advance in life (and I do), I am going to have to learn to function as an adult for more than three or four hours a day. I am going to have to learn to leave my comfortable womb for long periods of time without freaking out because I feel like I just cannot keep myself together any more.

It should be that I am solid most of the time, and a puddle only now and then. Not vice versa. But I guess I don’t know another way to fill my time and cope with reality.

I am pretty sure that if I got going with purposeful, focused action, I would want to keep it going. It has happened in the past. It feels good to be up and moving and activated. But that only lasts as long as I am able to keep busy. Any significant downtime, and I go back to being a puddle of laziness and ennui.

Guess I need to learn to contain myself.

Today in Ethics, we sank our teeth into Kant. That dickwad. I have to admit that, this time through, he’s not quite as infuriating as when I took him in College v.1 : The Early 90’s. Presumably this is because I am older, wiser, and less hotheaded. And less arrogant too, come to think of it.

But he is (was) still a git.

Today I learned that what set him on his path to (gasp) original thought (before he’d been an unremarkable follower of the philosophical dogma of the time) was an encounter with the works (and later, the person) of one of my fave philosophers, David Hume.

Kant was utterly horrified by Hume’s critiques of reason (or rather, reason’s pretensions) and his daring to base his ethics on, of all things, emotions. He concluded that the whole of philosophy, reason, and morality itself were under attack by this fat Scotsman who loved to drink, hang out in royal courts, and make it with the ladies.

Can you see why I love Hume so much? Fat, drunk, and stupid might be no way to go through life, but fat, drunk, and very smart can be damned fun. I really want that kind of life, where basically all you have to do is travel around and be very smart on demand. And for that, you live the good life.

It would be laddies, not ladies, for me, but otherwise, keen gear.

So of course, the fact that one of my favorite philosophers (Hume) sent one of my least favorite (Kant) into a sputtering fury pleases me to no end. Deal with it, motherfucker!

And the prof once again informed me that my flippant and bitchy joke about Kant being on the autism spectrum might just be the truth. I mean, who else but someone with at least a little Asperger’s in them would try to base a system of ethics on “reason”, let alone have no idea how badly they had failed?

I’m with Hume. Reason is not an end unto itself, it’s just a highly effective tool for achieving emotion’s ends. Any attempt to take emotion out of the question is ludicrously wrong-headed. We are human beings, not automatons, and everything we do, we do for emotional reasons.

Pretending you have somehow escaped that is far more delusional than any religion or dogma or self-serving egotism. It’s the sort of thing that gives rationalism a bad name.

My prof said that Kantianism only works for Vulcans.

Nah. Vulcans don’t need Kantian imperatives. They are smart enough to be full time Utilitarians.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man my afternoons suck sometimes.

Like today, for example. I usually would have gone straight from lunch to blogging on a Sunday. But I just couldn’t. I was too tired. So I had to go back to sleep. Dammit.

And afternoon sleep always sucks. It’s always the kind of sleep where I have super vivid dreams and wake up feeling like I have taken a savage beating while running a marathon underwater. And I know this, and that makes it doubly frustrating to have no choice but to do it anyway.

Seriously. I would have fallen asleep and hit my head on the keyboard if I had tried to blog right after lunch.

Windows 10 continues to be cool. There was one program it wouldn’t run, MUCKClient, the program I use to connect to Tapestries MUCK and hang out with all my furry friends. So I downloaded another program, Mudlet. And it’s okay, but I missed the old program.

So I right-clicked the shortcut to MUCKClient, and whaddaya know, one of the options was “Troubleshoot compatibility”. A few minutes with that, and now it runs just fine.

Thanks, Windows 10!

Ugh. Even now, part of me wants to crawl back into bed and go back to sleep, or at least hide from reality for a while. Stupid reality. Always so complicated and irritating. If I wasn’t terrified of what would happen if I was trapped inside my own mind, I would give up on it entirely! (Not really. )

The real problem is that I have not been using my CPAP lately. I had a very bad experience with it and I have been spooked since. I put it on, and it sort of felt like I was not getting enough air. But I ignored that, figuring it was just my claustrophobia messing with me, and went to sleep.

Two hours later, I wake up incredibly freaked out and tense, and I have to take the damned thing off and get up and use the computer for a while until my heart rate goes down and my blood oxygen level goes up enough for me to go back to sleep….sans CPAP.

And I have been afraid to use it since. I checked and the hose was connected firmly at both ends, and not leaking, and the mask was on securely. So I have no idea what could have caused the situation. It could be that my sleep apnea is getting worse and I need more pressure now. Or it could have been a fluke one-off thing and if I tried it again it would work fine, just like it’s done for hundreds of hours over the last year or so.

But I am too freaked out to try that. The thing about a machine like a CPAP machine is that you are trusting it to give you all the air you need while you sleep. That’s a rather extraordinary level of trust to grant any piece of machinery when you think of it. And I am not very trusting by nature in the first place.

I have emailed my rep, Marielle, about the problem. She wants me to bring the machine in for service. That’s doable but tricky with my schedule. Part of me wants to try it again before I take that step, but it’s going to be a while before I work up the nerve.

Then again, considering how crappy I have felt lately because of my sleep apnea, could it really be all that much worse?

Sadly, the answer is yes. I feel like I don’t have the words to capture how I felt that fateful night when my CPAP failed me. Oxygen panic has to be one of the worst kinds in the world.

And the thing is, it’s not the first time this has happened to me. It’s just the first time it’s happened with a CPAP machine on. It used to happen to me fairly frequently before I went on CPAP. That seems bizarre now. How could I have just put up with the possibility of that happening for so long?

I am beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as being too good at rolling with the punches and going on no matter what. Sometimes falling apart is the way your body and your life signal to you and the world that sometimes is terribly wrong and needs to be fixed before things get any worse.

But me, I just keep going. No matter what. Even when I was wasting my life doing nothing but play video games and hang out online, I never entirely broke down. And because of that, there was no crisis. No panic. Just day after stupid fucking day of distraction and depression.

And I feel like I still lapse into that as my default position. That’s why I have so much trouble keeping up with homework and assignments and such. I get home and I lapse back into useless mode.

It’s a terrible way to live, but I seem to be addicted to it. I suppose it’s a way of clinging to childhood, when it was perfectly fine to spend your free time amusing yourself and waiting for the next thing to happen. When I retreat into my cocoon of distractions and entertainments, I detach from life and go to a place where everything is safe and fun and easy to deal with.

It’s like a magic amusement park where there are all kinds of fun things to do inside… so fun, in fact, that you forget the rest of life. It stops being a way to deal with life and starts being a way to avoid dealing with life. Then it becomes your life and everything else gets pushed out for being too messy and complicated and scary and…. well, grown-up.

Hmmm. That might make for a good children’s book. Or maybe a book for people having trouble with the whole growing up thing.

Well I guess that’s all for me for today, folks!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am blogging to you tonight from my brand new PC, and wow is it roomy in here!

That’s because I am seeing everything at almost twice the resolution as I was on the old computer. That makes my little words look kind of lost in all this screen space. I am going to have to figure out how to fiddle with the settings in the browser and the control panel in order to make the test bigger, because I am having trouble reading what I type!

Man getting older sucks.

Obviously, I was able to get the necessary cable today. Turns out, I did drop it at the store, and they had it there waiting for me, so I didn’t have to buy a second one. That was a big relief and made me feel less stupid (and hence less depressed) about the whole thing.

I was fairly depressed earlier. I think it was a loss of motivation. But I managed to do the things I needed to in order to feel better, and that is all the motivation you need.

Went with J&J to Costco today. I was hoping they would have the cable I needed there, and therefore would not need to go to NCIX. But they didn’t. The area that used to have all kinds of computery type stuff is now nothing but endless models of big screen TV (including the new curved ones… I must admit, those looked good), with a smaller section of smartphones and tablets and such.

It’s very weird to me that they stock all that without stocking any of the accessories. I mean sure, the margin on accessories is lower, but you would still be better off having someone buy a TV AND the cables to hook them to their TV than just selling the TV and having the person who buys it go put the money for the cables into someone else’s pocket.

I can think like a businessman when I need to do so.

Seeing as this is a brand new computer, it’s running Windows 10, and the expected culture shock of going from XP to Windows 10 has mostly failed to appear. Everything works more or less the same. There’s a few little differences, but for the most part, for someone like me who doesn’t do much with his computer besides use the web browser, it’s the same thing.

I am not being forced to learn to use active tiles or some such.

It amuses me, though, that they have added what they call Task View, which looks exactly like the program-switching screen from the Macs I used last semester in Creative Writing class. What’s next, having program icons jump up and down like happy toddlers when I click on them?

Because those are adorable.

Now that things are up and running, I feel a lot better. I am back to being perkily optimistic (ish) about the future. I still face the rather large task of getting my files transferred from the old computer to the new (or the shorter but trickier task of getting someone to install my old HD into the new computer) before I can fully settle into my new computer space. but the big obstacles have been overcome and from now on, things are gonna be groovy.

Not much else has gone down today. Last night I ordered some Pizza (the) Hut(t). An order of cheesy breadsticks, a rectangle of Italian Sausage and Pineapple Panormous Pizza, and for dessert, Cinaparts.

I always forget that I don’t really like Cinnaparts. They seem good in theory and I always think it will be like a Cinnabon, but no, it’s more like the top third of an apple pie with icing on it. It’s not bad tasting or anything, it’s just not really my kind of thing.

And to think, I could have had a giant chocolate chip cookie that serves 8 instead. Oh well, next time.

Normally, I don’t order out until Saturday night, but I needed it a lot more last night. Needed to do something that made me feel confident and capable and competent. And good, of course. That’s why I went with a dessert instead of the other option, which would have been boneless chicken bites.

I am trying to find the proper role for the sweet stuff in my life, and I think the occasional (and I mean that) consolation when I am feeling down is OK as long as it doesn’t become an every day thing.

As it was, it ended up being enough pizza n’ stuff for like, three meals, so it was money well spent. I don’t get three meals’ worth when I order from KFC. So maybe I will Pizza Hut more in the future.

I have downloaded Steam to this computer. For those who don’t know, it’s the world’s biggest platform for buying and downloading games for the PC. You buy it on Steam and play it on Steam, and it works great. There are plenty of old games on there for free or quite cheap, which is good, because I have a lot of catching up to do.

I will probably continue playing games on my tablet, though. Both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. I am obviously going to be playing A-list games on my shiny new PC. But for laying in bed and messing around, nothing beats tablet games.

Oh, speaking of my new PC, I am loving how SMALL it is. It’s a quarter the size of my old PC. And it’s almost completely silent. All I hear 90 percent of the time is the very soft whirring of the cooling fan. The other components are silent. Once I completely switch over to this PC, that’s going to be strange. I am so used to hearing my HD access.

This truly is the future.

All in all, it’s been a great day (after a certain point) and I am even catching up on my Linguistics.

Ain’t life grand sometimes?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has been a roller coaster and I am honestly so stressed out right now that I don’t know whether to scream bloody murder into the cold unfeeling night or to break down crying and not stop till I am all cried out and there’s nothing left of me.

The following is a rough chronology of my day :

7:30 am : I wake up to pee, see the time, decide not to go back to bed because I would be getting up in an hour anyway. I had to be at school early today so I could meet with my prof about what my final project for History of Popular Music will be. I will be doing the history of electronic music, from the earliest analog electric organs through Moog and Kraftwerk and Vangelis into the synth pop of the 80’s all the way into modern times where those old synthesizer sounds are very popular in the music of the day.

Oh, and somewhere in there will be video game music.

9:20 am : I arrive at school twenty minutes early. No prob. I go to the classroom, sit down, play my game (Crashlands!), and wait my turn. It took some willpower not to insert myself into the conversations the prof was having with the other students. I sit right in the front, right by the prof’s desk, and they are talking about music, and I am kinda super cool with the prof because we’re around the same age, and so the urge to add myself to the conversation was strong.

But that would have been quite rude and inappropriate. Nobody likes people who do that, including me. So I restrained my over-eager geekitude and was a good boy.

The few times I slipped and reacted a little to what was being said, I felt bad about it, and told myself that as far as my role was concerned, I wasn’t there, I was a painting on the wall, I had no opinions and I should be ignoring the whole thing.

But I can’t ignore words, even when I should. So the best I could do was stay out of it.

10 am : Class starts, and at first we’re talking about psychedelia and the Doors and Haight Ashbury and that kind of thing, and I am like, cool, interesting times, interesting stuff.

But then we got into the 1970’s, aka the first decade with ME in it, and my kind of music, and my usual level of excitement in the class about all the cool music gets spiked into the stratosphere because we are talking about Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Pink Floyd, KISS…. by the time class ends, I have gotten excited so many times that it has actually left me kinda lightheaded.

1 pm : Class is over and I go sit and use my tablet to check my email. YESSS! My new PC is finally in! I call Joe and arrange to meet him at NCIX, then head next door to the NCIX in Lansdowne Centre to pick up my BRAND NEW COMPUTER!

1:20ish : I pick up my new PC without problems. There was one tense moment when the clerk presented me with two big boxes, and said “Now this box is the PC and this box has the boxes for all the parts… ” and I said “I thought it was assembled already! Isn’t what what I am paying you guys for?” and he said “No no…. it’s already assembled and it’s in the other box… ” because, of course, he was trying to tell me that the other box contained ONLY the boxes for the parts that were already installed in the PC in the other box.

D’oh! There I go, leaping to conclusions again. Sometimes my mind is too fast for my own good. It makes a huge leap, I go off half-cocked, and end up looking like a fool.

Oh well. You know what they say….. half a cock is better than none.

2 pm : Joe shows up to pick me up and help me get the computer home. There was a minor mixup over where I was in the mall. For future note, you can always trust my directions because I am person with a winning combination of mad verbal/logic skills and a tendency to get lost/confused when given directions. So my directions are always super precise, unambiguous, and logically simple.

Ask me for landmarks near me instead, and apparently I get confused.

2:30ish : I am home. I tear into the box with my PC in it like a kid on Xmas , set it next to my current computer, plug it in, and…. nothing. No juice. I enlist the help of my online friends, which is easy because more than half of them are male tech geeks who love to use their expertise.

But to no avail. Then, at some point, The Magic Happens ™, and the damned thing starts working.

3:30ish : I, with help, figure out that I don’t have the right kind of video cable to hook my new PC into my monitor. So it’s kind of a paperweight until I get one. Eventually, I pull myself together, take a bus to the mall, go back to NCIX, buy the cable, and take a cab home.

4:15ish : I am home. Finally, I will be able to use my new PC! I open my kitbag and…. nothing. The cable isn’t there. I must have lost it somewhere along the way. ARGH. So very much ARGH. All the fucking ARGH.

So that’s been my rocky roller coaster of a day. Right now, all I want to do is curl up with my tablet, play my game (Crashlands!), and forget everything for a while.

Tomorrow, I will ask Joe to take me to the mall so I can buy ANOTHER of the same damn DVI to HDMI video cable, and guard that thing with my fucking life.

Hopefully, by tomorrow, all this will be an unhappy memory, and I will be happily playing with my new computer and making new memories.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One thing keeping me from growing up is that I am still looking for adult approval.

This occurred to me while I was urinating yesterday^[1]. I am still looking up for that approval from above. My mind (or soul, depending on your POV) is stuck at that stage. Even my desire to be a famous author that everyone says is brilliant is really just another way for me to seek the same praise for my intellect that I got when I was an absurdly precocious child.

In many ways, I still feel absurdly precocious, and I am 42.

Having recognized this, I now need to pick my way very carefully across the minefield of the zeitgeist. Common wisdom is that it is bad to need approval outside yourself before you can love yourself, and that you have to love yourself before you can let anyone else love you.

But for me, that’s a trap, because that line of reasoning can only lead me to having one more thing, and a fairly potent one at that, to hate myself for.

I’m such a pathetic loser, I don’t even love myself! I’m such an IDIOT!

That should be a cartoon somewhere.

Hence the minefield. It can be a very tricky thing to recognize one’s flaws enough to improve oneself without letting the demons of depression out of their cage to tear you into tiny twitching pieces.

I honestly think that is how some people become semi-narcissists with unflagging self-confidence no matter what the evidence might say. They didn’t say “I want to be a total prick!”, they just decided that they were going to believe in themselves no matter what and took it a little too far. To the point where, in the service of this phenomenon, they just plain stopped listening.

It would explain a lot, wouldn’t? About people like Donald Trump and his ilk? I assume it starts off within the realm of sanity – they start out just thinking “there’s no point listening to the naysayers, I have to follow my heart!”

A certain amount of that is actually quite healthy. Or so I’ve heard.

But then they start ignoring evidence as if it was just a negative opinion, and eventually, they fall into a sort of solipsistic black hole of ego protection.

Anyhow, back to the looking up thing.

So I am not going to beat myself up for this whole thing. I already knew that I was missing a whole lot of what I needed to grow up inside and that doing it now was going to involve some very unpleasant revelations and humiliating insights.

So it suck to realize that I am still looking for adult approval, but only by realizing this can I change it. It hurts, but it’s the worst part and now it’s over. Now I can start healing.

I don’t think there is anyone who is entirely immune to wanting validation from others. Even the holy men who wander out of the desert to teach people what they have learned about selflessness are looking for students to listen to them and validate what they are saying.

Ergo, while not needing the validation of others is a very healthy and worthy ideal, like most ideals, it is a direction, not a destination. Few people achieve it, but all should pursue it.

Right now, I need so much approval, validation, and reassurance that it humbles and frightens me to contemplate it. I have a very, very, very heft emotional tab that I have been running since I was very young, and sometimes, seeing it paid off with everything I have missed seems impossible.

But a starving man doesn’t need to eat every meal he’s ever missed in order to be healthy. He just needs enough for his body to use to repair itself.

And I have been emotionally starving for a very, very long time. I was just too lost and locked away in my very pretty ice castle to even be able to feel it. And that went on for a long, long time.

Drugs can only treat your symptoms. Paxil has helped me deal with it. But it’s only anesthetic. And anesthetic doesn’t cure a thing.

Even now, it is very hard to face the enormity of it. Something has been very very wrong in my life for a very very long time and the more I learn about myself, the bigger it gets.

Still, I have faith that there are solutions that even a hardcore materialistic rationalistic pragmatist like myself can accept. I am not exactly sure where someone like me gets the necessary permissions to override one’s internal sense of self-measurement and reset the scales like some people get from religion, but it must be possible.

Maybe instead of looking for a cosmic connection, I should be looking for the right person for me, and connecting with them. But I have a very hard time believing such a person exists. Another thing I have realized recently is that I have almost no faith in the ability of others to help me.

Not that nobody has ever helped me. Tons of people have. But they can’t help with the real problem, which lies deep inside me, and there is so much clear ice and hard snow between me and the world that I can’t feel the help I get, and so I still feel abandoned and alone inside.

And so, without the evidence that people do love and care about me being able to make it through, it feels like nobody can ever help me. Nobody can even reach me. Nothing gets through.

But I know there must be a way to crack the ice and let the sunshine in. Maybe it will be something I figure out, but probably not.

It will probably be something that just happens one day when I take a stone off my grave, a stone just like the millions I removed before, and my light can finally burst through to the surface and shine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it finally happened. The moment I have been dreading. The point of crisis. Trial by fire.

Tonight, in Linguistics, my brain just plain shut down.

It crashed. We were learning to diagram a sentence the linguistics way, and it was all coming too fast for me, and the stack of things I didn’t get got higher and higher, and eventually, it all came crashing down.

And I still haven’t recovered. A lot of my mind is still seized up like a high performance engine with way too little lubrication. It’s a combination of emotional trauma and mental overload that is going to take some time to thaw out and give me by brain back.

At least I can type.

And the thing is, I am absolutely sure I am capable of understanding the subject given time and the ability to work at my own pace. But tonight, it was like a cold bomb went off in my head and froze everything.

I know I am using a lot of metaphors that don’t make sense together. Sorry.

And both the teacher and a very nice East Indian girl tried to explain it to me, and I wish I could say that it worked, but it didn’t. The girl went away thinking she wasn’t explaining it right, which is technically true, but I wouldn’t put it that way.

It’s like saying someone failing to beat the world record for long jump just isn’t jumping right. Well yeah, but what they are trying to do is incredibly hard, so it’s no shame to fail at it.

What I am saying is that my brain was frozen to the point of Olympic level stupidity.

Now there are a lot of bad way I could go from here. Bad ways I have gone before. I could decide that I “suck” at Linguistics and quit the course. I could blame the teacher for making the course too hard. I could even blame Linguistics for being so fucking complicated.

But I am not going to do any of those things. They are unworthy of me. I am going to do my damnedest to wrap my brain around this stuff, and if I fail, I fail. I will fail all the way to the final exam, if that is what it takes.

The one thing I will not do is quit.

No more grabbing the first excuse to GTFO of a situation just because I am not happy with it. No more assuming that if it doesn’t come to me naturally, it’s too hard for me period. No tapping out just because I want to go back to my hidey hole and lapse back into being pointless, unimportant, and devoid of worth.

The world doesn’t give a fuck about your potential, kids. It cares what you can do.

So I am going to attack the problem and keep on slugging. Right now, it all seems to be irresolvable ambiguity and grasping at shadows. But I am coming at it in an already frustrated, freaked out, fucked up, and frozen state.

Maybe when my mind and heart thaw out, it will all become clear. If not, I will enjoy the novel experience of having to learn things the way normal people do.

You know… with hard work. Weird.

The experience I had tonight was not entirely novel. It has happened to me exactly once before : when I was trying to learn computer programming.

I breezed my way through the first semester of programming. I had full expectations of doing the same in the second semester. But that rising escalator the prof had talked about that I had so smugly assumed was for other people caught up to me. Past a certain point, I was not actually absorbing the information at the speed at which I was receiving it. Or rather, I wasn’t integrating it fast enough.

And faithful readers will know that I don’t handle undigested info very well.

Eventually, all the things I don’t understand accumulate to the point where I crash. I don’t understand part C because I barely understood part A and part B is a total mystery to me.

And the problem is that my mind shuts down at that point, which means parts D, E, F, and G are entirely lost on me. I can’t just absorb the later parts and then fill in the blanks later. Nor can I deduce the missing part from the parts I have, which is something you would think I would excel at.

Nope. One indigestible blog of information, and the whole system shuts down. Which is fine in places where you are learning information at a steady rate in a logical sequence, like a history class.

But if it’s something which builds in complexity, each new level contingent on the previous ones, then I get the feeling the crash is inevitable.

Unless the process is really, really slow and I am free to stop the lesson at any point and persist in questioning until I understand it.

That’s not going to happen in a university class.

I gave up on programming. Quit the course, decided it wasn’t for me. Maybe if I had stuck it out, I would be a millionaire app developer now. Maybe not.

But there is no way I am giving up this time. This is it. This is The Battle. This is the fight for who I am and who I want to be. Am I the kind of person who quits when things aren’t super easy for him?

Or am I the sort of person who keeps on fighting no matter what, and refuses to quit no matter how bloodied and battered he is from the fight?

The universe can throw a lot at a person. Life is hard, even for the naturally gifted. And there will be many times when you will be tempted to give up on yourself and let the universe win.

But the path to glory is to refuse to do the universe’s work for it, and make it either literally force you to stop…. or let you get what you want.

And I am tired of giving up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.