I’ve been pondering this question for a while now (see previous article) and I feel the need to output the results once more.

First off, I don’t like that name any more. The problem is not stupidity and it is intellectual elitism to call it that. I can see that now.

In fact, it might be better described as “the problem of intelligence”, because it is we of the intellectual class that have the problem. People normal intelligence don’t have a problem at all.

So let me re-frame the question : How do we, the intellectuals, deal with the fact that the world is populated by and run by people of normal intelligence, who are only stupid relative to us.

It is the biggest challenge we intellectuals face. To us, it seems like the world is run by idiots, because compared to us, it is. The world is not run by intellectuals, no matter how much we might wish it to be otherwise, and to be honest, it probably can’t be.

For one, it’s unclear exactly how big a proportion of the population we represent. We may not even have the numbers to fill all the countless leadership roles the modern world needs.

And even if we did, not all of us have leadership skills. In fact, given both systemic problems handling the exception and the fact that it is possible that being an intellectual automatically makes you less likely to have the necessary social skills because those circuits are being used for abstract reasoning, means the pool of intellectuals with leadership skills is likely to be quite small.

And of course, even if we had some way of honing in on exactly those people who have the full package, there’s a little thing called democracy of which I am quite fond. It would be lovely to have some way to make sure all jobs go to the right people, but in the real world, that’s simply impossible.

Plus, of course, intelligence and leaderships skills do not necessarily make one wise. If you think intelligence is hard to define, try wisdom.

So there is no workaround for the problem of being an intellectual in a world full of people who, from our point of view, are stupid people doing obviously stupid things. ^[1]

We can’t arrange to be in charge, and we tend not to be comfortable with our traditional role as mere advisers. Most of us really do want to help humanity, and see it prosper, but a lot of us have given up and become misanthropes because it can seem like an impossible task. The dream to use our wizard-like mental powers to improve the lot of humanity often dies when it turns out that humanity is not listening and would rather continue to grunt along like animals.

But there is a flawed assumption in that feeling, and that is the assumption is that these people, the regular folk of the world, could understand us and be enlightened and make life better for themselves but choose not to.

Maybe they literally cannot understand. To assume they can is to assume everyone has the same kind of mind as you do. But we know that isn’t true. Everything in an intellectual’s life points to them being different from everyone else.

Perhaps the real fault is in our own theory of mind. We just plain can’t think like normal people do. Not even as a thought experiment.

Or maybe we can, but deep down, we don’t want to, because the full burden of knowing just how large the gulf between us and them would be too damned depressing.

From the point of view of us cerebral types, the mind of people of normal intelligence are a much richer blend of intellect and emotion than ours. They do not have the highly developed abstract reasoning engines that intellectuals develop naturally. They have to make their decisions based on a much high percentage of emotion than any sort of intellectual would prefer.

Once we understand and accept this simple truth, the true model of how intellectuals should interact with the rest of humanity : not tyrannical, nor advisory, but parental.

Like parents, we can do our best to keep them out of danger and protect them from threats they don’t understand yet, but ultimately, they have to (and will) make their own mistakes and learn the hard way.

And we need to have the patience and courage to shake our head, sigh, then keep on parenting.

That’s the best that we can hope for. Know that, as with any form of parenting, there will be times when they don’t understand, don’t listen, or find themselves unable to resist doing the wrong thing even when they know it’s a bad idea.

That doesn’t mean you give up on them. That would be bad parenting indeed.

And obviously, this isn’t the sort of thing that we tell the people of normal intelligence (PONI’s) about. Adults don’t like being told they are being treated like children. In fact, they often behave quite childishly in response. Which makes sense, in a way.

Nobody resents being treated like a child more than a child, and we all have a child within us who remembers the long battle with grownups to be treated like an adult.

Regardless of the necessity of us not making a big deal over it, I still feel that viewing the PONIs as a parent does a child is the best way to view our role. It captures both the compassion and the frustration of our position, and reminds us that intellectually speaking, we have the advantage over our charges and that things always have to be simplified to the point where our “children” can understand.

Despite how it may seem, we really are the ones with the most power in the relationship.

And that makes us the ones with the responsibility.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yesterday was rad.

The first meeting of the revived (by me) FRED went well. It feels really good to be organizing something again. Actually, it doesn’t just feel good, it feels right. Like this is something I am supposed to be doing. Right now, my life plans don’t include an organizational career, but I might want to consider it.

Being the guy who brings it all together and makes it happen is awesome. It’s an act of creation, just like writing. Creating something out of nothing.

That’s what it is all about for someone like me.

Who know, once I have FRED 2.0 up and running, I might try something more ambitious.

I got to talk with Graeme about my story. See, R. Graeme Cameron has started a new ‘zine dedicated to giving promising unpublished author (like moi) their first professional sale. He asked me to send him some of my stuff, so I sent him a sampler of four of my short stories.

The story he choose was my Five Dimensional Roommate series. Groovy. Turns out he thought it needed a lot of editing to take out stuff he thinks is not necessary. Fair enough. He can do whatever he wants with it as long as my name is on it and I get paid.

So when his next ish comes out, I will be in it, and will get paid $20 for it. Might just frame the check.

Don’t know why I am so sleepy today.

Oh, I have to write down this dream I had. I dreamed that I was taking a really hard test about language in a classroom a lot like one of the classrooms in the elementary school I went to, Parkside Elementary back home in Summerside, though I am positive both students and teacher were adults.

And almost immediately, my test… disappeared. I looked and looked through all my papers (for some reason, there was a lot of other papers on my desk) and I found other things from the same class like graded homework and other handouts, but the two pieces of paper with the test on it were gone.

So now I am freaking out, thinking I am going to fail the test because it’s really hard and it was probably going to take the entire allotted time to completely so every second that goes by mean less of the test I will get to complete. Finally, tears in my eyes, I begged the teacher to let me take the test at some point after class, by myself, so I would have enough time.

They weren’t keen on the idea, and said I should take the test now, with everyone else. I asked “Well do you have another copy?”, because at first, it looked like they didn’t and I figured I would get out of my problem that way.

But they did, and I took it back to my desk, where it, of course, disappeared. So now my freaking out shifts into overdrive. The last thing I remember from my dream is sob-whimpering “Teacher… it happened again!”.

Teacher. Not professor. Interesting.

Not hard to interpret that one. I have already told you fantastic people about how Linguistics class is stressing me out. So a “super hard test about language” is a reality of my life.

And things going missing or getting lost is a very common theme in my dreams. It’s the curse of the absentminded. Subjectively, things really do go missing and get lost to us all the time.

So I am guessing that was a classic stress dream, like the ones I used to have where I was wandering the halls of my high school because I didn’t remember what class I was supposed to be in and I couldn’t remember the combination to my locker either.

The other cool thing that happened last night, after FRED, was that Felicity and I went to a Halloween-themed birthday party for a friend of hers named Cat.

It was awesome. A smallish group of freaky cool people who really went all out in setting up the house to be a goth fun house. We were there for around four hours, and my social anxiety was largely absent.

Plus there were cats! They had to be locked away in a room for the party because some people were allergic, but Felicity and I went to visit them (of course), and later I visited on my own.

There were two cats, both toms. There was Gizmo, who was very friendly and sociable, and Kitsune, who was very shy and mostly hid.

I did manage to get Kitsune to come close enough to sniff my hand, but that was it. If I had been able to sit and use my full cat-vibe powers, I probably could have gotten him to let me pet him. I have done the same with other very shy kitties.

It’s a matter of patience and putting out the right vibe.

When I was in there on my own, I pet Gizmo a bunch. It was lovely. I miss having kitties around to pet. He got all purry and rolled over on his back a few times. Awwww!

Mostly, I am proud that I made the decision to go to this party with Felicity and socialized with a bunch of people and nothing terrible, either real or internal, happened.

I didn’t get a lot of laughs, but I realized that I really should not judge social interactions that way. It wasn’t until last night that I even realized I had been doing it. I was treating social interaction like it was standup comedy, and that meant that if people didn’t laugh at my jokes, that meant I had bombed.

And that meant failure and rejection.

This was clearly not right. Life is not a comedy club. People can fail to laugh but still like you. It doesn’t meant you have failed.

Although I think it is that core neurosis that had led me to be the hilarious (ish) dude I am today.

All artists have something fundamentally wrong with them, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My fancy new headphones keep cutting in and out, exactly like the old style wired headphones would do when one of my many Walkman (Walkmen?) were on their last legs because the jack was wearing out.

This has me in such an agitated state that it makes me want to hit somebody, preferably someone responsible for this situation.

I mean, what the proverbial fuck? How can this be happening to me again? All I wanted was to be able to groove to my tunes while I get from Point A to Point B. Why is that such a hard thing for me to achieve?

I have an experiment I plan to do where I connect the headphones to my other tablet to see if it’s the originating station’s fault, or the receiving.

If it’s the originating, that’s bad but I can deal with it. I was thinking of getting a new tablet anywhere, or if not, at least a dedicated MP3 player.

One with a display, though. None of that iPod Nano bullshit.

But if it’s the receiving end, in other words my fancy schmancy new $70 headphones, heads are going to roll. The literature on the things says it has a range of 30 feet.

That should handle the distance between my ears and my pocket just fine.

I wouldn’t be nearly this upset if it didn’t involve my music. My tunes, man. I get really emotional about my music. Having something happen while I am listening to my music is extremely traumatic to me. Music is inherently based on maintaining flow, and to have that shattered not just once but over and over in a random way in the span of seconds is like torture to me and my poor nervous system.

The distress is heightened by what happened over the course of last week. I had been wanting to listen to music on the way to and from school all week. But either it would be raining, or the tablet I use for mp3’s wouldn’t be charged up, or the headphones themselves would have lost their charge, or I would be all set to do it then forget to take either tablet or headphones with me.

And that’s a kind of torture too.

But I figured I had it sussed today. Everything was charged, I had both halves of the equation with me, it wasn’t raining, and I was only going one block to my pharmacy to get my meds.

But no, the goddamned thing started to cut in and out, a little at first, and then more and more, exactly like what would happen in my Walkman days. So it’s not just torture, it’s progressive torture, as if it was designed specifically to break me.

This is the sort of thing that reinforces my impression that life is hard on us sensitive artistic types in ways regular people could not possibly understand. Normal people would not be nearly as upset by this situation as I am because they don’t connect with music on a deep emotional level like I do.

It’s the most right-brained thing I am into. And I need that kind of thing. Us overly cerebral types really need something that bypasses our overweaning superegos and connects with our emotions directly, and mess with them if it is needed.

We need something to run the icy blockade and bring badly needed supplies to our besieged hearts.

Plus, of course, I am still fretful and anxious about the whole new computer thing. That already has me on a state of heightened emotional amplitude. Plus I do have some caffeine in my veins.

If I am going to keep drinking Diet Coke, I am going to want to learn to keep the extra energy from turning into anxiety. I really want it to actually lift my mood. That would be way, way better.

But right now, my mood is still too damned heavy.

I have done some other online shopping lately too. I ordered some expensive fat-guy sneakers. $160, and that was on sale. But hopefully these will at least be able to bear my weight without flattening. They might even let me walk comfortably and without pain.

It’s a dream worth paying for.

I have also ordered two pairs of fat-guy pants from the Mr. Big And Tall website. That was not at all fun. It is incredibly depressing to find out that even in a store dedicated to serving the overweight, you are too fat for most of the clothing.

Most of their jeans only went up to 48 inch waists. That’s almost a foot too short for me. I am starting to think that my realistic weight loss goal should be less “fat” to “skinny” and more “gigantic freak of nature” to “regular sized freak of nature”.

Oh well. Two more pairs of jeans are wending their way to me. That’s the important part. I will then have four, and that will be more better than have two, like I do now.

Having only two means I do laundry every other day, sometimes more, and that makes me nervous that I will wear them out with overwashing and then have none.

It is a severe liability to be without pants in these modern times if you are a dude.

The last thing I am going to order (that I know of) is a wallet. Mine is slowly and gracefully falling apart, and seeing as I have had it for around twenty years, its retirement is long overdue.

I am bracing myself for option paralysis when I go to make the purchase though. There’s a lot of types of wallet out there and my needs are strictly functional. I am tempted to get one of those “magic wallets” I see on TV that say they can hold all your cash and change and cards and get no bigger than a deck of cards. I am dying to know if they can live up to that claim.

But it’s probably bullshit. I bet you can do that with any wallet if everything in it is super organized. And I ain’t got time for that shit.

Ain’t nobody got time for that shit.

Well that’s all my aggravation for today, folks. Thanks for reading.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just finished watching Avengers : Age of Ultron. It’s pretty good.

Had some real dramatic heft to it, which is good. A lot of modern superhero movies don’t move me, and if a movie doesn’t move me, the best it can hope for is to amuse or entertain me. And that means there is no chance of the movie being anything better than “okay” in my books.

But apart from all the bang clang boom business^[1], there were some very good performances and a script that made me feel for the heroes, and the villain as well.

Ah, the villain. Ultron. That’s my one and only major beef with the movie. Its version of Ultron was far, far too human. Comic Ultron is the ultimate inhuman adversary, brilliant and completely ruthless, not to mention nigh-indestructible due to being made of an adamantium/vibranium allow. All that made him absolutely terrifying. He’s like the Terminator crossed with Mister Freeze to the power of Brainiac. Like the Terminator, Ultron has no doubt, no hesitation, no pain, no weakness.

And every time you defeat him, he comes back stronger.

But movie Ultron, with the voice of James Spader, was just some guy, ya know? Some Hollywood guy who does stunts or owns a gym or is someone’s personal trainer. His motives are unclear and he is never given a real personality. He wants to slam a meteor into the world to force humanity to evolve (totally not how it works), or just to kill everybody, or maybe he just hates Tony Stark, but maybe he is Tony Stark in a sense. It’s all poorly defined.

And the Ultron of the comics is one of the top villains on planet Earth. And also, because of how perfectly scary he is, one of the coolest. The movie version didn’t frighten me at all.

He should have had a voice that sent chills up your spine because of how cold and devoid of emotion it was. It should have been the voice of a sociopathic serial killer, not some Southern Californian douche.

Ultron deserved better. He didn’t even get the Age promised him in the title.

Other than that, though, everyone was cool. Hawkeye was given a secret wife and kids, which is out of character, but his actual personality is an asshole^[2] , so I will let it slide. They did a good job with Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. They don’t look like they do in the comics, but they got their personalities and relationship right, and that’s more important.

The only way to get a superhero movie in which everyone looks like they do in the comic would be to make it fully animated, and while I am all for that, it’s probably not going to happen.

The CGI for the Hulk made him look a lot more like Mark Ruffalo than in the first flick. Black Widow is, well, Scarlett Johanson, a incredibly beautiful woman with enough talent that you can plausibly claim to have cast her on that basis. Captain America is done perfectly, except for maybe being a little too flippant. Robert Downey Junior continues to be a very good Tony Stark. Not exactly like the comic one, but close enough. They are both egotistical, highly driven, incredibly intelligent, inclined to take matters into their own hands, and somewhat obnoxious.

The comic version is just a little slicker and suaver about it.

My favorite, though, was The Vision. He was always a favorite of mine in the comics, and they got him right in the movie. Specifically, they got how The Vision, being an artificially intelligent robot but also a good guy, is incredibly noble and pure and good. You can totally see what the Scarlet Witch sees in him. He loves humanity in its totality and treasures our frailty and flaws as what makes us human.

How can you not love that? He’s the perfect humanist.

Still no sign of my new computer. Grr. Wannit. In order to contain my anxiety and neurosis, I sent them an email asking if there was any problem, even though they have one more day (Monday, sigh) on their projected lead time for assembling and testing my new PC.

I just had to do it. I was going nuts. The anticipation is driving me crazy. It’s like being a kid on Xmas Eve, except you don’t know when Santa will arrive.

“I guess he’s not coming tonight, Little Timmy. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe not. ”

I’ve always been prone to over-excitement. I have mentioned before how when I was a kid, I would get so excited about something I was anticipating that I would get nauseous. I eventually learned not to let it get that bad, but I am still like that at heart.

And that would be fine if it wasn’t for the uncertainty. If I knew it would be ready on such and such a date, I would calm right down and wait. I am very good at waiting when the end point is known.

But when it isn’t, I have to constantly fight my anxieties and nervous temperament in order to maintain any semblance of emotional balance.

Maybe I should lay off the Diet Coke until it arrives.

Nah. I don’t want to end up sleepy and headachey. Damn you, caffeine addiction!

I feel stupid for having forgotten to stop and pick up my psych meds on the way home from school today. I am going to have to go get them filled at Shopper’s tomorrow.

Luckily, tomorrow night is the first meeting of the revive (by moi) FRED, so I will be out and about anyhow.

Feels weird to be unmedicated. Luckily, I usually have one day’s grace period before it starts having a noticeable effect, and I have only missed one day.

Well, that’s it from me tonight folks. Wish me luck on the computer thang.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been watching Avengers : Age of Ultron, and it’s got me thinking about reason.

Specifically, on the state of reason, and the version of it I will call transcendental reason.

I have, in my mental peregrinations, achieved levels of insight that created a mental state unlike any other. It is both alienating and comforting, insightful and ignorant, disconnected yet hyperconnected.

It is, in my belief, the result of a certain mindset receiving the emotional input of a very high level of the sensation of insight. So high, in fact, that it empties the mind of everything else, and for a brief time, the individual exists in a mental space of seemingly perfect clarity.

And it… is…. marvelous.

Not for everyone, of course. For people without that particular mindset, it would be, I assume, positively ghastly. To them, it would feel like dying as all their hot-circuit emotions are shorted out and only the cold-circuit emotions remain. To them, it would be like being disconnected from reality entirely and left in a world without warmth, comfort, or humanity.

But to a certain mindset, a not entirely healthy one, it is bliss.

Suddenly, the cacophony of thoughts, suppressed emotions, and all the other noises of the mind are silenced, and that is what creates this sensation of utter clarity.

And for that particularly cerebral mindset, clarity means calm and calm means quiet and for once, everything makes sense and all is in order.

In this state of mind, all the complexities of the world seem laughably simple, the individual feels entirely in command of themselves, and everything feels like it is in the right place.

It is, in fact, the perfect complementary opposite of the mystical epiphany. It is my opinion that when mystics, the religious, and other transcendentalists have their spiritual breakthroughs, what is actually happening is that, by whatever means, they have managed to stun their left hemisphere minds into inactivity.

And the left mind is the separator, the divider, the discrete intellect. So when it is inactive, all separations disappear and, as a result, the person feels at one with the universe. All things are one, all separations are illusions, and all is warmth and light and love. Everything in the world glows with an inner light, and a feeling of enormous harmony and peace comes over the individual.

And it doesn’t matter whether things comes from thought, prayer, drugs, or meditation. The result is the same and that’s why transcendental mystics worldwide teach nearly identical lessons of unity, harmony, humanity, transcendent reality, and a very deep sort of meaning.

Transcendental reason, on the other hand, happens when this feeling of insight (however achieved) is so profound that it causes the right side of the mind to become functionally inactive, and therefore leaves the left brain all alone to run the show.

This is why it requires a certain kind of mindset to consider this enjoyable. It takes a mind that is heavily invested in reason\thought over intuition\emotion, and therefore is in constant struggle against the “noise” of emotion, intuition, the mystical mind, and so forth.

For such a mind, the sudden cessation of “noise” is bliss, and because it is the separating and ordering side of the mind that is in control, there is a sensation of perfect detachment from the world and all its hot-circuit complications, and everything being safely and neatly in order.

For people with that kind of mindset, like myself, this is marvelous. Peace at last. It is a sensation so profoundly moving and ecstatic that it might very well the thing that drives the search for knowledge and insight within the emotional machinery of the scientific mind.

If insight was sex, transcendental reason would be the orgasm, because it is akin to the pleasure of the insights that came before it, and yet of such a quantitative difference that it creates a qualitative difference as well.

The thing about it is that it is very, very cold. Emotion still exists, but it’s only the subset that is compatible with left-brain functioning. Even the bliss created by this state of mind is as cold as space. It is the bliss of relief from overstimulation, like escaping a hot, loud party into cool night air.

It would be easy to simply dismiss this phenomenon as some accident of mind or maybe, if we are feeling generous, an occasional bonus to reward the individual for being so intelligent.

But the kind of mindset that experiences these moments of transcendent reason is not a healthy one. It is, in fact, profoundly unhealthy, in that it treats most of what is going on inside its mind as useless (or worse) noise and ignores (and therefore does not deal with) everything but the small portion of the mental iceberg which shows above the water.

That is, shall we say, no way to run a railroad.

And no matter the polarity, transcendent experiences have a tendency to have a very profound experience on the individual afterward. This can lead to negative outcomes as the normal balance of power in the mind is thrown out of whack by the experience and causes the individual’s mind to break down.

And it often begins as something seemingly positive. The transcendent mystic becomes warm, generous, and overflowing with positive sentiment. The transcendent thinker becomes calm, confident, and even swifter of mind than they were before.

But we have two hemispheres for a reason. The mystic turns into the fanatic and loses all sense of proportion, personal autonomy, and moral restraint. The thinker turns into the brutal rationalist without mercy, empathy, or tolerance.

I don’t know what it is like to have the mystical transformative experience. It sounds wondrous and potential very therapeutic, but I have a feeling a rigidly reason-bound mind like mine is not open to that sort of transcendence.

But I have experienced the other end of the spectrum, and as wonderful and strange as it was, it was also profoundly alienating, and I would not wish to experience it again.

I am disconnected enough already, thanks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, sitting on one of the cheap but very comfy couches at KPU Richmond at 2:40 in afternoon, waiting for my class to start at 4, eating 7-11 pizza and drinking a retarded expensive 500 ml of Diet Coke, and typing to you wonderful people.

The pizza is a lot better than I remember. The sauce has actual flavour.

As you know, I had therapy at 1 today, and I decided that, after the usual post-therapy trip to 7-11, I would get Joe to drop me off at school instead of home so I could hang out and chill at KPU RICHMOND for a while.

This is a deliberate exercise in low level social exposure therapy for me. Part of the deal is that I can sit wherever I like as long as it is not tucked away out of sight somewhere. No hiding!

Heck, I just upped the stakes by sprawling out on the couch. I have never been this comfortable in public before.  Take tgat, social anxiety !

(Though I now face a social paradox. : every social instinct tells me I should not be wearing my sneakers while on the couch. But they also say I should not, under any circumstances, take my shoes off in public. I am solving this problem by dangling my feet of the couch, exactly the way I used to do when I was a teenager and my mother told me to get my feet off the couch.

Teenagers are such assholes.)

I realized some during therapy today, something that I think I have said before but this time it really clicked :

Nobody is good at structuring their own time. Nobody.

That is why both the retired and the unemployed (and the children of the rich) have a much greater rate of depression and suicide than the general population.
Human beings need an external source of structure in their lives to give predicability and purpose to their lives, and without it, they wither away.

And to think, I have been beating myself up for not being able to create an entire life out of nothing when that is something nobody can do.

Well, maybe Very Organized People can do it.

Depression really does lie. It told me I sucked for being unable to do the impossible, and I believed it for a long, long time.It

One of the most important aspects of recovery is forgiving yourself for being human.

(—)

After class now, and grr, I missed my bus and have to wait for the next one.

I want to be home, eating and blogging and living the good life.

And I guess that if I was going to get my new PC today, I would have heard by now.

Truly, this life is naught but a vale of tears.

Are these really short paragraphs irritating you?

I am very tempted to get something sweet from Tim Horton’s in order to soothe my pain, but that is the sort of thing that gotcme into this mess in the first place. So I will resist.

Mental note : find a healthier way to activate the reward center of my brain. Food is easy but it can kill. And religion is out of the question. Maybe I eill just concentrate on getting really good at masturbation.

Do the really advanced stuff that requires an elaborate system of pulleys and chains and erotic statuary.

If I was rich, I would have an entire garden devoted to erotic statuary. Not because I am sexually attracted to masonry, but because I like to celebrate the wonder that it human sexuality in all its glory.

Plus, it would make a wonderful setting for my orgies.

And believe me, if I was rich, there would be orgies.

(—)

Home and fed now. Back to orgies. Always a cheerful subject.

I wouldn’t be hosting these orgies simply because I am a huge pervert. I mean, I am, but that’s not why.

It’s because I truly believe in sexual freedom and the spiritual power of satiation. Most people go around with unsatisfied desires that they can’t even recognize in themselves, let alone address. These unmet desires taint the soul and prevent people from truly being free.

My orgies would be events aimed at healing the damage. They would be safe spaces where everybody can be who they want to be and get what they want to get. I would work very hard to match people’s desires, so that the person who dreams of being stepped on by a fat lady in a maid’s uniform wearing rubber boots finds the person who wants nothing more than to be that fat lady.

However, that might not always be possible, and so I would hope to attract a dedicated group of followers who share my philosophy and who, like me, would love to make people’s dreams come true.

I would especially need highly adaptable beautiful women, because while I love all body types from petite sylph to Ruebenesque amazon, the world is full of men whose ultimate fantasy involves sex with really beautiful women, and I don’t discriminate.

There will be plenty of handsome sexy men around for the ladies too.

And it wouldn’t just be about sex. It would be about all the desire of humanity. Activities would range from rutting like stunned monkeys and stuffing your face with awesome food to attending a symposium on the role f labour unionism in international communism.

Whatever you want, you get, inasmuch as it is in my power to grant and nobody gets hurt who doesn’t like it.

I bet people would learn a lot about themselves once their hidden desires have been satisfied. They might just find out who they really are. They might just experience a great spiritual awakening. They might be able to resolve traumas that have festered unexamined for decades.

They might just have a really good time. That’s totally cool too.

The one rule would be consent. And that rule would be ironclad. No exceptions. If you do something to someone against their will, you might just lose your keys to paradise.

Also, if it’s a major infraction, I may kick the shit out of you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I made it.

Today was a rough day, because not only did I have Creative Writing (which was rather fun… and yet… more on that later), I had to get together with my partner to complete the homework for Linguistics, there was also a test in the same class today.

However, as it turned out, reviewing the homework in class (complete with RIGHT answers) before the test was pretty much all the refresher course I needed, and I think I did fairly well on the test.

I am sure this was all part of my professor’s diabolical plan.

Even the fact I had to do group work turned out well. Jonathan, my partner, is a great guy, and we actually had fun trying to figure out the right answers to all the questions.

In other words, I actually had normal, friendly human interaction with someone I barely know.

Now THAT is a corrective emotional experience. I will talk about it with my therapist tomorrow.^[1]

Eventually we were joined by a third guy, whose partner had completely bailed on him (poor guy) and so he needed someone to compare notes with, and that was Jonathan and me.

Dude radiated nervous energy. It was sort of cute, in a way. It was clear to me that he needed a friend and I can’t refuse anyone under those circumstances.

And a lot of other circumstances, really. I’m such a softy!

And it was okay when we were all working on the homework (turns out, other people can get right answers too!), but later, when we happened to meet up again after the test (we all finished early), dude talked nonstop and Jonathan and I could barely get a word in edgewise.

Clearly, he was just happy to have someone to talk to and share his thoughts with, so I let him rattle on without interrupting much. I have been in his position and done the same thing.

Oh my god, people are LISTENING TO ME. I must make the most of this!

If it happens again, though, I will give him some gentle feedback (or possibly panic and be brutally blunt and hope my charm smooths it over) so that Jonathan and I get to talk too.

And now that the homework and test are behind me, I feel a huge weight has been taken off my shoulders, and the rest of my week will seem like a cakewalk. A stroll through the park.

A really easy crossword puzzle.

Plus, some time in the next three days, I should get my NEW COMPUTER.

And obviously, the New Toy factor on a brand new PC is through the roof.

So that should keep me entertained for a while, both with the fun of checking out all the neat stuff it can do and the possibility of playing games for the PC that I have been wanted to play for years.

I have at least two Fallout games to play! War never changes.

So after tonight, things should become quite pleasant.

I have pondered whether the increase in video game possibilities is a threat to my plans to get my feces in a lower number of pieces re : school. But to be honest, there are a lot of hours in the day. I can crack the books and play video games and get other things done too.

I just have to take a more active attitude toward life.

Interesting but by no means coincidentally, ever since I swore off sugar for a week, I have felt a heck of a lot better. The fact that I have doubled by dose of Vitamin B12 is probably playing a factor too. My skin feels cleaner, I am quite clearly passing a lot of toxins out of my body when I urinate, and overall, I just feel like a more wholesome critter.

That doesn’t mean I will forswear sugar altogether. Those sort of commitments are inherently doomed. Too much pressure, too much stress.

But it does mean that I will have all this new information about how much better life is without it.

And if I really want something tasty from Tim Horton’s to spice up my meals, there’s always bagels and croissants and such!

They are still carbs, alas, but at least they aren’t full of sugar.

Come to think of it, my upswing in health might also be due to my eating trail mix instead of starchy junk food. I may have discovered my new diet.

My creative conflict with my Creative Writing professor (sorry, instructor) seems to be coming to a head no matter how hard I try to be cool about the whole thing. We got into it a little bit today.

Basically, it comes down to precision and clarity. I want her to clearly and precisely tell us what she wants us to do. But to me, her descriptions are vague and open to multiple interpretations.

So when I was clearly becoming frustrated about it, she came over, and told me that not everybody thinks like me, and she has to teach in a way that everyone understands.

This after a very unproductive attempt to figure out what exactly she wanted via conversation. Hence my increasing level of frustration, which I recognize can seem pretty scary to people who don’t know me.

All they see is a huge bearded fat guy who is getting increasingly angry.

She actually told me that “not everybody thinks like you” (well, duh, I’m not autistic for crying out loud).

And that is more or less where the conversation ended. But when this comes up again, I will go into it with a few facts :

1) I don’t have this problem with any other professor.
2) If she is trying to make her instructions understandable to everyone, that should include me, right?
3) She can ask Nicola Harwood about my communications skills.

I think what is really going on is that she has no idea what she is doing and when I ask her what exactly she means, she literally does not know. She is the sort of person who operates on vague ideas, and that’s bound to come into conflict with my high precision brain.

So I dunno. I am really hoping we can work this out. I need this course.

Oh, and one last thing about Linguistics. It occurred to me in class that this was it. This was the challenge I have been looking for. This is the course that will make me have to really push myself.

And so far, I have been a whiny bitch about it. Well no more.

It also occurred to me that this must be what normal students feel like all the time. For some people, every course is like this. For others, only some.

But it’s only rare birds like me that find it a shock to find themselves in this position.

With the matter thus framed in my mind, I can square my shoulders, draw my trusty blade (my mind), and attack the course with glory on my mind.

For once, things aren’t way too easy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has not been wonderful.

For one, today was the day of the big placement test I was sweating, and I am sure I did horribly, because I could not find my textbook and therefore could not study beforehand.

So I had to guess, and while that works wonderfully on multiple choice tests, this was written, and I just did not know the specifics of the subject matter at all.

And the subject matter was Utilitarianism, so it really hurts that I didn’t know it. But the thing is, I know Utilitarianism very well. I just don’t know how others define it.

I make a better philosopher than a philosophy student, methinks.

Not only did I bugger the beagle on the test, but I completely blanked on the essay that was due today. Only found out about it when a girl I know from Creative Writing class asked me if I had submitted it electronically. Um…. no.

So when I got home, I had to slap together something fairly zippy-quick and send it off. It’s not my best work, but what the hell, at least it’s done.

As if that wasn’t stressful enough, tomorrow I have both a major assignment due AND a major test in Linguistics, the subject that is scaring the crap out of me because we have to learn so much so fast.

What is worse is that I was supposed to do the assignment with a partner, and I gave my partner my email figuring he would email me and then I would have his email and we would hash it out between us… but he never emailed me. And I didn’t know his name. So we were both kinda fucked.

So I figured I would do the assignment on my own, even though the two of us were supposed to turn in one answer sheet.^[1]Then I took a look at the assignment and realized I didn’t even understand most of it.

Ergo, I have not done most of it. And my partner finally contacted me today, so now I have to not only do it but somehow coordinate with him on the answers.

I am really hoping that I eventually catch up with the damned course. She is throwing so much at us so fast. I feel like I barely get any time to absorb an idea before three more come along. And I am taking notes furiously at the same time, even though all her slides are available to me online.

There’s a lot more to what she says than is on the slides.

So tomorrow is going to be tense.

Oh, and speaking of tension, my therapist gave me more of the dissolve-under-the-tongue anti-panic-attack pills I had (and lost) before…. and now those are gone. And I could have really used them dammit.

I don’t know if I am losing them, or someone is stealing them. Either way, fuck. I can’t imagine them being used recreationally, as all they do for me is give me a feeling of cold calm, which is a lot better than a string of firecrackers going off in my anxiety center, but not exactly euphoria.

But perhaps, for people far more anxious than I^[2], finding an island of chemical calm in their maelstrom of anxiety is like spending the day in Heaven. I wouldn’t know. I have anxiety problems in social situations, and sometimes they feel downright overwhelming.

People with anxiety disorders freak out all the time for no reason, though. I almost always know why.

I am still pretty damned damaged, though. I can feel it acutely when I think about things like group work or joining a club or whatnot. The panic starts immediately. The difference is that now I am fully conscious of it, and can look at all my social damage and ask, what the fuck?

It’s clear that, at a very deep level, I am afraid of people, especially “normal” (non-nerd) people. Unless I feel safe behind my battlements of intellect, I am one very scared monkey, and when I have to deal with my fellow monkeys in realtime and in person, all kinds of very nasty stuff crawls out of the depths of my psyche and I do not feel the slightest bit sane.

And that’s…. bad.

It makes me wonder if I am capable of getting close to people at all right now. I have mentioned before how I can simulate closeness with others but in reality, they are not really getting into the club.

And I can totally deal with the most intimate levels of other people’s minds… as long as it’s in text on a screen. I can probably do it in RL realtime too, and it might even give both sides of equation a feeling of closeness and intimacy, but that’s a lie, because I never really opened up. I never really let the other person in like they did for me.

Because nobody gets in. For some reason, that is terribly important. Nobody gets in.

So go ahead, explore the mansion, wander the grounds, sample the food and drink, and be charmed and entertained and fascinated by the cheerful fellow I pay to pretend he is me.

But the real me is locked inside a hidden safe room staring blearily at a hundred video camera feeds and never, ever, ever sleeping.

There might be a story in that.

So I know I have a long way to go before I have healed all the social damage I took throughout my childhood. And during a lot of my adulthood too. Isolation damages you in so many ways… and the worst thing is, it makes you want to isolate yourself.

Because you are so damned scared of all those other monkeys.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.