Just finished watching Kingsman : The Secret Service. It was okay.

Pretty standard action movie, really, with some interesting details in the styling. The whole Kingsman operation is like you combined the Roger Moore version of James Bond with the aesthetic cool of John Steed from the Avengers (the non Marvel one). Very proper British gentlemen (and ladies) in impeccable bespoke clothing and with the cool and easy manner of the truly civilized kicking ass like motherfuckers while retaining their aplomb.

It is harder to imagine, at least in the North American mind. a better symbol of civilization fighting the forces of barbarity and savagery than that.

It’s the story of a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks who calls in a favour owed his dead father in order to get out of a spot of legal trouble, and ends up being recruited into the Kingsmen, an independent spy group that does James Bond type stuff without being attached (or accountable) to any government.

The villain is Samuel L “Motherfucking” Jackson. He plays a tech billionaire who is so concerned about global warming that he plans to kill most of the human race in order to stop it. He plans to do so by offering the whole world free cell phone service via these free SIM cards and then using said SIM cards to put out a pulse that drives people into a total homicidal rage.

So, standard supervillain stuff. It was never really about the environment. Sam Jackson just wanted an excuse to kill everyone but him and his rich and powerful friends. The movie never says who was going to do all the work once most of the human race is killed, or where these elites thought their food, clothing, gasoline, jet fuel, wine, and everything else they expect out of life was supposed to come from.

Makes me want to write a story to that effect. Have a bunch of elites “go Galt” and then have to deal with issues like the sudden radical inflation of the value of labour (what servants they brought with them would suddenly find themselves with a truly staggering amount of bargaining power) and the fact that everything they consume comes from a vast civilization that is interconnected on every level and therefore kind of hard to pack into your rocket ship or whatever.

In other news, I had one of my (luckily quite rare) sleepless nights last night. Well, sort of sleepless. I got around an hour and a half of extremely poor quality sleep, then got up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Just plain all out of sleepiness. I got another 45 mins of shitty sleep at around 10 am, and that is it. So I am running on very little rest right now, and in a couple of hours I will be going out to dinner with La Gang then off to a BCSFA meeting then back to here to hang out till 3 am.

So I am going to do my damnedest to get at least an hour of sleep before I am called back to active duty. It’s been that kind of weekend. This is why I did not want FRED to ever be on the same weekend as the BCSFA meeting. It’s so much in such a small period of time. Thank goodness I don’t have class until 4 pm tomorrow. I am gonna be pooped.

I am sort of tempted to skip the BCSFA meeting. Get caught up while the rest of La Gang is there, and rejoin them when they come back. Get rested up.

Ah. Turns out we will be hanging out at Felicity’s parents’ place instead of here. Felicity’s father is in the hospital from a gall stone blocking his duodenum plus the fact that the surgery resulted in an inflamed pancreas (eep). Felicity doesn’t want to leave her mother alone at a time like this, so she doesn’t want to stay away for too long.

So it’s hanging out over there tonight. Which, through nobody’s fault or intention, increases my stress. I don’t feel as safe there as I do here and it’s harder for me to relax. So, social batteries will not recharge while I am there, sad to say.

And then a week of classes…. then I have a date on Thursday to go see Zootopia for a 2nd time with Spuug….

Like I said before, this whole going to school thing is seeming like such a drag lately. I am glad I only have a bit less than three weeks left of it. Granted, it means I have a lot of final projects to work on and final exams to study for, but at least I know I will be done for a while soon.

Which means that I had better start working on The Next Step ASAP. Another semester of Kwantlen, another institution, sticking a trumpet up my as to become a musical fartiste…. the possibilities are endless.

Going to school seems increasingly ludicrous to me. I know that’s not stupid. I even know that I am not exactly miserable while in class, largely due to my studious note taking. That keeps me busy enough to keep the feelings of restlessness and being trapped at bay. But when I am not in class, the idea of going to class four days a way and putting up with all its minor indignities seems ridiculous. Hence my desire to set out for pastures anew.

Switching to a new institution, one where I had more faith in the education I am getting and the people giving it to me. Or maybe just new period, it’s hard to tell. But I feel the need for some kind of change to freshen things up for me.

I dunno. Maybe I will just sign up for summer semester classes and then see if I feel more inspired. Maybe I will finish my associate’s after all.

All I know is, I want to move on to better things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about my social mask lately.

Actually, calling it a mask is a vast oversimplification. If that is all it was, nobody would ever ask the question “But which one is the real me?”. You’re the person wearing the mask. End of story.

But it’s a lot more complicated than that. It would be facile to pretend like that mask is not part of our true self. It might be different than what it hides, but it’s still a part of us, just as our skin is a part of us even though it’s different from what it protects.

And even our social masks reveal who we really are. We don’t create them entirely from scratch. They come from parts of us we have discovered it is safe to express. Our social mask might not, in some sense, be our “true selves”, but it is made from the same stuff. One cannot simply doff one social mask a don another’s. They are custom fit.

I used to fool myself into thinking that, unlike others, my open and honest self did not have a social mask. But that’s ludicrous. Not only do I have one, it’s one that confines me quite strenuously, and the very notion of dropping it scares the shit out of me.

Not literally. I mean, come on.

The mask is easy to define, because it’s the person most people think I really am. That cheerful, funny, happy go lucky fellow with the brilliant mind and the clever jokes and the goofy sense of humour. The fellow who can be very charming and who has a big presence and a a great deal of warmth.

And I love that guy. But it’s not the real me. I wish it was, I really do. I wish it so hard that sometimes I actually believe it. But the real me has a lot more complexity and depth and nuance. And, most importantly, it has things which do not fit that persona at all, and because I would rather be that guy than the real me, that means I have heavily suppressed the parts of me that don’t fit the picture. And it’s only been within the last few months that I have been uncovering the real me and trying to accept the parts of me that I would rather not have and have pretended didn’t exist for years.

For one thing, I have a quick temper. That’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s undoubtedly true. I can go from calm and mellow and groovy to very angry in a heartbeat. For years, this fact was obscured by the draining effects of depression and my utter inability to express my anger or even confront it.

But there is no doubt about it, I have a quick and potentially volatile temper. It’s hasn’t become a problem yet because I still suppress myself pretty fucking hard. But I am working to pry my fingers from that override switch and let myself feel things and even, sometimes, to express and act on those feelings, even if it makes things messy, complicated, are hard to control.

Fuck control, man. Too much self control can kill you. You have to give yourself room to breathe. Room to live. Room to just be you, instead of the person you are trying to be. The person you think you should be. The person under the mask.

Another thing I only recently figured out about myself : I’m actually kinda hyper. Depression hid that too, but my period of studying the phonetic alphabet intensively really opened my eyes to how much activity I need in order to be happy. When I had the phonetics to focus upon, I wasn’t exactly blissed out. In fact, I was somewhat stressed and not having a ton of fun.

But then I woke up Wednesday morning and realized that I had to go back to not knowing what to do with myself again, and that was really depressing. I found myself wondering how it was that I could live that way for so long. Directionless, diffuse, and distracted. Having to work so hard on learning the phonetic alphabet gave me a glimpse into what life might be like if I really applied myself.

So it’s not that I was really happy doing it. I was just a lot less miserable.

But I know I won’t go from layabout to busy bee overnight. I still suffer from a large dose of paralysis of the will, and that will take a long time to overcome. The self-sedation I have mentioned before will be one hell of an addiction to overcome.

Take this weekend. It’s gonna be a very busy weekend for me. I have FRED tonight and the BCSFA meeting tomorrow night. Then back to school Monday. To my introverted self, that makes it seem like I am not really getting a weekend. Too much socializing! Social batteries draining! Surely I will die!

I’m exaggerating,but that is truly how it feels. And the thing is, there is some truth to it…. but not much. I will be fine.

It’s the addiction to retreating to my safe space that makes me think otherwise. The constant availability of the escape into my distractions (and, when even that becomes too much, into sleep) has led me to become addicted to it, and to consequently feel like if I stay away from my little womb/tomb here for too long, something terrible will happen.

But I know it won’t. Tonight I will have a nice dinner with friends, then come home. Tomorrow night I will go hang out with a lot of the same people. I will have plenty of “me” time in between, and being far away from my retreats will not kill me.

In fact, the most likely result is some positive social input, and that’s good medicine for a sad little critter like me.

There’s probably a lot more aspects of myself I need to unearth and express, but I made a good start today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Felicity, you might want to skip this one, as I talk about an incident between me and Joe)

So I am being a bad boy and ordering in and putting it on my VISA card, which is connected to my education fund, or rather, part of it.

And I will probably do it again on Saturday. Strange things happen when I am bored. Strange… and expensive.

And I am sort of soothing a wound. I had agreed to watch stuff with Joe at 6, then at 6, he seemed to have forgotten. Maybe he was just feeling anxious and depressed. I certainly know how that feels. There’s been times when I didn’t want to meet a commitment I made earlier due to anxiety.

But I do it anyway. Every single time.

So now I am dealing with a dose of disappointment, which has never been an emotion I have handle well. I suppose disappointment is the opposite of enthusiasm, and I am big on enthusiasm. I’m an enthusiastic person when the depression isn’t getting in the way and weighing me down.

So I look forward to things. And that is very good for my mood, having things to look forward to. It pulls me forward emotionally and makes me feel like life is (or at least can be) good.

But in the process, the enthusiasm fills me up like a balloon, and so when disappointment pops that balloon, I end up feeling quite…. deflated.

Sometimes my metaphors come so easily to me it’s scary.

And the thing is, it wouldn’t have been so bad if Joe hadn’t been so anxious. Like I had caught him doing something and he was desperately trying to talk his way out of it. That’s both weird and upsetting. If it was just that he forgot we’d made the plan (entirely possible, seeing as the plan consisted of me saying “see you at six!” and him saying “okay!”), he could have just said “Okay, I will be out in a minute”, or “I’ve changed my mind”. I would have been disappointed, but not upset or mystified.

And only a little disappointed.

This sort of thing shakes me up, sensitive hothouse flower that I am. Surprise, disappointment, uncertainty….. those are three of the four horsemen of my neurosis.^[1] I will be fine after time has passed and I have had something to eat, but at the moment, I am shaken.

(—)

-) One surprisingly fast Chinese food delivery later…. (-

Wow, dude on the phone said it would be 45 minutes and it was more like 20. I had hoped to be done blogging at about the same time the food came, but nope.

Oh well. The food was tasty, the meal has settled me down some, and I would presumably be totally relaxed if not for my tendency to drink Diet Coke with my meal which does a good job of boosting me into the proper frame of mine for blogging, but sometimes also makes me nervous and jittery.

See, this is why I have never trusted stimulants. I get enough stimulation from my chronic anxiety, thank you. If anything, I need a tranquilizer. Part of me wishes they still gave those out like Halloween candy like they did in the Seventies.

I would probably be a lot less healthy (there’s some very good and utterly terrifying reasons they stopped) but I would be a lot more mellow about it.

It’s weird. I have known that I have social anxiety for a long time now. Over a decade. And yet, somehow, I never thought of myself as an anxious person. I thought of myself as a depressed person. And clinically speaking, I suffer from depression with social anxiety aspects.

I only figured that out for sure recently, when reading about what people with full blown anxiety disorders go through. I have had some hard times, but it’s been nothing like that. There are people who have a dozen panic attacks a day. People whose panic trigger is far, far too sensitive, and their own body decides it’s adrenaline time without the necessity of a fear stimulus at all.

So, while I have a lot of anxieties that have been major obstacles in my life and made it very hard to function, the overriding condition is the depression. When I was a recluse who never left the apartment alone, I had almost no anxiety.

People with anxiety disorders do not have that luxury. They are never “safe”.

Today was Therapy Thursday. I told my therapist the whole story about what happened when I tried to become a Cub Scout (it’s at the end). It feels good, and right, to push that story out of my head and into the world. Like the bad shit that went down with my neighbour Donna, the Cub Scout thing is one of the very bad things that happened to me as a child, and the only way to deal with those is to drag them out of your memory and share them with others. Only then do they lose their power.

So I send my pain into the world to fend for itself. I am sure there are many more such stories lying in my memory, waiting for something to jog them loose. I look forward to it, as perverse as that might seem. It is never fun and I am still processing the Cub Scout one, but the road to mental health leads through the dark forest of painful memories that you must return to, in a safe way (after all, they are just memories, they are not really happening to you), and finish experiencing them.

Finish the moment. That should be the mantra of classical psychotherapy. Go back. Find the emotions frozen there, and experience them. They are only there because you hit the pause button on them in order to cope. You can totally go back and finish the job and move that shit out of your brain for good.

It won’t mean it never happened. Nothing can do that.

It will just mean that it is over.

I will talk to you awesome people again tomorrow.

History class, that is.

Today we talked about the formulation and construction of the Canadian identity as shaped by the post-WWII governments of Canada.

So if you have ever wondered when the quest for Canadian identity started, it was 1945. That led to the Massey Commission in 1949, and their highly protectionist report released in 1951. It was this report that gave the official stamp to Canadian’s justifiable (but not always justified) paranoia of being culturally dominated by the Americans.

It was the Massey report that (eventually) led to things like the Canadian Council for the Arts and the National Research Council, both institutions that have had a huge (yooge) impact on Canadian life despite how little Canadians know or care about them.

Like I have said before, Canadians don’t fear their government. They have too little respect for the government to fear them.

And it’s the Massey report we have to thank for all forms of Canadian Content rules, which I support. I am all for keeping the door open for Canadian talent. My problem tends to me that the system, without anyone planning it that way, seems to reward mediocrity.

I honestly believe that the various funding gatekeeping agencies subconsciously think of mediocrity as part of what makes something “Canadian”, and that if presented with something truly excellent, they would fear it and declare it to be un-Canadian.

After all, it doesn’t look cheap or depressing and it actually stirs people’s interest! Nope, nope. We can’t fund that. Something like that can’t possibly be Canadian.

When we were talking about TV (my favorite subject after music), Mister Dressup and the Friendly Giant came up. I was one of the only students who had heard of either of them, and the only one who had actually watched them both as a child.

I watched the Friendly Giant, but was never super into it. I hated Rusty, chiefly (I can see now) because his cheapass falsetto voice bothered me, but also because he was so whiny and wimpy and lame. Jerome was great, Friendly himself was okay, and of course, I loved Friendly’s animal band.

But today, I realized, my favorite part was the opening.

I really responded to whole “invitation to sit by the fire and relax and listen to stories” aspect. That’s the exact “warm and cozy” vibe I have loved and looked for my whole life. It was an invitation to feel happy and homey and included. Someone actually wanted my company!

It’s sad how early that was a big deal for me.

Mister Dressup, on the other hand, was da bomb as far as I was concerned. Like several generations of Canadian children, I loved Mister Dressup with the pure, irrational, total devotion of a child. This puts him on my list of people about whom I will not hear a single word against.

And a hell of a lot of Canadians agree with me, of course. If PBS can always defend their funding with Big Bird, the CBC could always defend theirs with Mister Dressup when he was on the air. All it would take is the slightest hint that funding cuts would hurt Mister Dressup and there would be a legion of grown-up Mister Dressup kids demanding the freshly decapitated head of whoever suggested the cuts.

We are legion, we are passionate, and we are not inclined to listen to reason.

And I realized today that the solution to the mystery of why I was so devoted to the show when I can’t say I actually enjoyed the content is dead simple : I loved spending time with Mister Dressup. He was such a nice guy that it was a joy just to be there with him. It didn’t matter what actually happened on the show. It was Mister Dressup that made me feel good.

And that’s why I say that Mister Dressup with never die. Ernie Coombs died, and that made me very sad. But Mister Dressup won’t die until the last of his TV children is lowered into their grave.

Because the subject was our struggle against American cultural imperialism, we had to cover Mister Rogers too. He never stood a chance with me. Mister Dressup was a wonderful uncle. Mister Rogers was the epitome of the exact kind of adult I didn’t like when I was a precocious kid. All touchy-feely and slow-talking and creepy, maintaining eye contact for way too long, radiating a very fake sort of warmth, and making me feel like he was talking to me like I was a very fragile kind of idiot.

Of course, that’s not remotely true, either about Mister Rogers or any other adult of the era. They were just treating me like a kid. I am sure their approach worked wonderfully for most kids. It was just weird little intellectual firecrackers like me that had a problem with it.

What else? Oh right, I have one story from today that I absolutely must share.

In the mid-Fifties, the Canadian government was talking about making Canadian Content rules for the movie theaters. Hollywood didn’t like this idea any more than the Canadian movie theater owners, who didn’t like the idea of their precious screens losing money while showing Canadian crap.

So Hollywood solved their problem in a very Hollywood way : they invited all the decision-makers involved in deciding if these CanCon rules would be implemented down to Hollywood and treated them like movie stars (including hobnobbing with actual movie stars) for two whole weeks.

And THEN they sat down and negotiated with the Canadian government. Having been quite thoroughly compromised by the glamorous life, they immediately gave up on the whole “content rules” idea and settled instead for some bullshit Council of Canadian Cooperation that led to the creation of a bunch of shitty Mountie movies and that’s it.

Now I think of myself as a pretty ferociously independent person not easily swayed from what he knows is right. But I am pretty sure that would have worked on me, too.

That’s how it works. It doesn’t take long for the gratitude you feel towards the person who has been so kind to you to overwhelm your higher judgment, and not much longer than that before the rich and powerful have you feeling like one of them, not one of those pathetic low-status yokels back home.

That’s how it works in the capital city, and that’s how it works in Hollywood too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because I already used “the other side” and “the opposite shore” sounds so poetic.

I took the big phonetics test that I was studying for all weekend. I think I did okay. I figure I got maybe seventy percent, which is a lot better than the previous test, where I got 11.5 out of 41.

I am not going to crunch the numbers to turn that into a percent mark because it would be too depressing.

But what the fuck. I can’t be good at everything. Linguistics is clearly not in my destiny. I never expected it to be. I only took it out of a general interest in language, and like I have said before, I had no idea it would be so brutal and so demanding. If I had know, I would have said “Nope! Nopenopenope. ”

All my other courses seem like nothing by comparison. So there’s that.

Ethics? Pshaw, that’s just a philosophy class. All I have to know is the basics of various people’s theories and some of the details. The rest is just thinking and writing, and I am awesome at both.

Creative Writing? As if. Frustrations with the prof’s communication style aside, as long as all we have to do is write, I’m a happy guy. I wrote like four poems in today’s class and enjoyed doing it. Give me a challenge and I will crush it into itty bitty pieces.

Canadian History Since 1867? That’s just remembering things. Plus the course is super easy. I have had one assignment so far and it was easy. There’s one more and then a final exam. That’s it.

And, last but the opposite of least, History of Popular Music, which is a class I could take forever.

So I am not too worried about all the Linguistics stuff. You can’t win every race. Part of college is figuring out what you do NOT like. Me no likey Linguistics, at least not how it’s been taught to me.

Pondering potential alternatives to another semester at KPU. I pretty much have to throw convenience out the window because there’s no schools worth going to which are as convenient for me as KPU Richmond. Odds are, no matter where I went, I would have a substantial commute.

That kinda sucks, but it’s also liberating, because it means I can go into the search process with options wide open. Maybe I could go to UBC or SFU. Or find some little art college with a good reputation for having a solid creative writing program. Or maybe I could enroll in the university of the road, traveling the world, opening my horizons, and probably dying of some preventable disease somewhere.

All that assumes that VFS is out of the question. It has first dibs on me. I emailed them a week ago regarding my prospects. Haven’t heard back. I assume it’s time to escalate. In this case, that means calling them and being benevolently insistent about getting some kind of answer.

I suppose I could just apply and see what happens. It would cost me the application fee, but what the hell, I have it. It would be worth it just to know I tried.

If I got into there, I would be a shining fireball of ambition. Writing for TV is something I want more than anything else in my life. I honestly think that I belong in show business. Not just that I have the talent, but that it would be a place where I would get along and feel like a part of things for once. I want to be someplace where I can harness my enormous creative potential and pour it into something truly amazing I can share with the world.

Back to Linguistics. The next test is the next class, and it’s on phonology, specifically the rules for how words get changed by usage.

Like, there’s the addition of letters, called epenthesis. That’s how an English word like “milkshake” (2 syllables) becomes “mirukusheku” (5 syllables) in Japanese. It’s also what causes people in certain places to turn “film” into “filem”. Some people just have a problem with consonant clusters!

Then, there’s elision, which is the dropping of letters. We all know this one. It’s how “suppose” becomes “spose” and how aspects is usually pronounces “aspecks”.

Then there’s metathesis , where the sounds just get reversed. Like how “prescription” turned into “perscription”, or how little kids can’t say “spaghetti” so they say “pasketti” instead.

Lastly, there is the most interesting and mysterious one, assimilation. That happens when the word is transformed into a form that’s easier to say. Like we all know it’s “you and me”, but most of the time, we pronounce it “you an me” or even “you n’ me”. “Writer” gets pronounced “rider”, “have to” turns into “have ta” or even “hafta”, and “sandwich” is pronounced “samwich”.

Must make it very hard for those learning English. And yet, English would sound very strange indeed if we pronounced each word precisely and separately. We’d sound like robots, or just incredibly stuffy and pretentious. I get the feeling that there are a lot more rules of this sort to come.

Where I come from, the local accent is highly musical and highly compressed. That’s how the question “did you eat yet?” can turn into “djeetjet?”. Or how “go away with you” turns into “gwaywichya”. I have pondered putting up signs in my homeland of Prince Edward Island with these transformations on them in such a manner as to suggestion that they are place names.

Imagine the fun. “Remember dear, we’re parked in the ‘Wassupwichu’ lot. ”

Then they go talk to a local. “Um…. wassupwichu?” “Namuch, you?” “What?”

And it amuses me that there are statements in the dialect back home that would be gibberish to most people in the world but perfectly understandable to me. It’s like speaking Cockney, Scouse, or Glaswegian. The language spoken is definitely English, but…. different.

I miss my home sometimes. I miss the salt air. I miss the town that will always be “home”. And of course, I miss the heck out of my family.

Maybe I can bus and air b’ n b home this summer.

Wheels within wheels….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I am definitely not the cruncher. I’m the crunched. Ow ow ow.

The test is roughly 24 hours from now, and I don’t seem to be making much headway in the “identifying vowel sounds correctly” field. I do exercises but I don’t seem to be improving, and learning the vowels is only step 2 of a 3 part process.

The 3rd part is learning all that mouth placement bullshit. I am hoping I will invent some way to make it all systematically united in my head. If I can do that, I will have no problem remembering, because then each entry will relate to the big picture in a way I can understand and therefore I can remember it no problem.

But first these goddamned vowels. I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. I get most of them right. And some of the ones I get wrong are debatable.

But some aren’t. And I look at them and know that the transcriber is right. and I can’t imagine how I got it wrong. But I did. I am still finding it very hard to match a vowel sound from what I am trying to transcribe with one of the example vowel sounds from my notes. It all seems too ambiguous to me, and I suspect that is ironically because of my keen ear for language.

Well, and my very precise mind. The vowel I am trying to transcribe doesn’t sound like one of the ones in my chart to me. There are so many subtle differences!

I gave finding a website with tons of exercises a try, and they are definitely out there, but all the ones I tried used the actual IPA, which is not the one we are learning in class. So they are useless to me. I mean sure, I would love to learn the one that seems to be the actual internationally recognized one, but at this point, I really have to prioritize.

I can learn the actual IPA some other time.

So it’s back to transcribing sentences from my head and then checking them with the transcriber and seeing where I got it wrong.

I am thinking that I will create my own version of the vowel chart that uses my best approximation of the actual sound instead of a word. So “oo” instead of “boot”. I think I can make it work, and it would be very “me” to solve a problem by inventing a system.

How very INTJ! It’s how we do things.

I am slowly letting go of the idea that I will master this shit before the test. If I had been sufficiently serious about that, I would have studied from the end of the last class until the beginning of the next one, nonstop. Or at least until I truly had mastered it.

Again, this course is forcing me to learn like a normal person. I assume people without my particular mental gifts stress out before every test and spend a lot of hours trying to cram the knowledge into their heads in a way that will stick, and have to try a ton of different angles and approaches before they get there.

Me, I am so fucking spoiled. I’ve never had to do that. If that is what “studying” means, I have next to no experience with it. The closest I have come to that is burnintg the midnight oil to get an assignment done, and even then, there was no stress. I was supremely confidant in my ability to do it and do a good enough job of it.

It just took some extra work.

So I am in a unique place (well, except for the last time… ) for me. I have to learn it, I don’t know if I can, but I know I have to keep at it till I get it.

I am fairly sure that I can pass with what I know now, but it would be damned close. At some point, I may have to accept that I know the phonetic alphabet as well as I am going to and turn to the mouth position stuff in order to maximize my chance for actual decent marks.

Better to get my transcriptions (and translations) 3/4 right and the mouth position stuff 3/4 right than get 100 on phonetics and 0 on the rest. Right? So I will drill oh the phonetics tonight but after that, when I get up tomorrow, it’s all bilabial affricative nasal stops, or whatever.

And no matter what happens tomorrow with the test, the sun will still rise Wednesday morning, I will still be whole and hale and extremely bright and talented, and life will go on more or less the same. Worst case scenario is that I fail the course, and while that has never happened to me before, it would not, in face, kill me.

Might take a while to get over it though. I’m so sensitive!

We got out ethics exams back today. My team got 80 percent, which is pretty decent. The section I did by myself got a 7.5 out of 10, or 75 percent, which is a little below my desired 82 percent but still within acceptable parameters.

Almost got into it big time with the prof when she said that most of the exams talked about cultural relativism without even defining it. Funny, I thought the fact that you were asking me a question about it implied that you thought I knew what it was. Hence the question itself proves I know what it is. I really didn’t think I had to explain it to the person teaching it to me.

What can I say, I write to my audience. Imagine how insulted you would be if someone sent you an email that explained things the sender knows you both know. It would be atrocious.

And yet she, and other profs, expect me to somehow know when that has to be done. It’s unfair. I know what the damned thing means or I wouldn’t be able to answer the question!

I think I know how people on the Autism Spectrum feel when they are expected to understand facial expressions.

I’m not a mindreader goddamn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here it is, 2:10 PM, middle (ish) of the afternoon, and I am super damned sleepy.

This is becoming tedious. I don’t want to sleep another afternoon away. I want to be awake so I can study my phonetics and try my hand at some transcription and get this shit down cold before the test on Tuesday. Oh, and also to get the damned homework done.

Not to mention all the assignments and projects due in the next month.

I even had nice caffeinated Diet Coke with my lunch, and caffeine is supposed to help you stay awake. But no. Right now I want to go to sleep and not wake up till my birthday in May.

It would be a shame to sleep through that, after all.

I dunno. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been using my CPAP enough. At least it and I are on good terms again. That one night where I woke up barely able to breathe must have been a fluke or something. I once more trust my CPAP to give me air through the night. I have done it a bunch of times lately. Not all the time, sadly. I should use it every single time I sleep. Maybe then, I would entirely catch up on decent sleep and be all parky happy and full of energy and eagerness. That would be awesome.

Had some pretty amazing dreams lately. Dreams which are, sadly, far too XXX NSFW to share, but I have to applaud their inventiveness. There was a lot of crazy wild stuff in there. If I could record my dreams like on Red Dwarf, that one would make for one heck of an avant-garde porno.

I like it when I remember my dreams. They are always fascinating to me because they give me a glimpse into what is going on under the hood of my conscious mind. Being a totally cerebral dude, it is not easy for me to even perceive what is going on in my subconscious mind, let alone embrace, understand, and accept it.

And a mind divided cannot stand.

Been having another go at the whole ego thing again lately. Getting that 19/20 on my short story set it off. I am once more attempting to integrate the ways in which I am exceptional into my self-image instead of kind of ignoring them and/or taking them for granted.

It’s amazing how hard that is. My mind really resists the change in the status quo represented by trying to develop some pride and worth in myself. It’s so much easier for me to just evade the whole issue. Am I great? I don’t know. In some ways I am, I guess. It’s not something I like to think about.

And that’s true. I don’t like thinking about it. It makes me feel queasy and dizzy, like I have an inner ear infection and a heavy flu at the same time. But I have to do it because it’s the only way I am going to construct a positive self-image. And without one of those, I will continue to be emotionally unstable and experience an ever-changing world without stability or safety.

The only way I am going to get out of the sea of emotion is to construct my own land, and plant my flag on it. And then stick with it no matter how the storm rages and the wind batters and the waves try to sweep me off my feet and back into the dark cold sea.

In the past, that’s been my strategy. Just let go. That’s why I have so little solidity in my world. Letting go is easier. Let the flood take me where it will. It might not be the safest route but it is the one which requires the least commitment, energy, suffering, strain, and stress, so I have taken it time and time again.

But I need some solid ground to stand upon. I need to take up arms against my sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. And that means finding a way to truly accept and believe in my own power and worth.

And that means taking responsibility for it too, which might be the problem. I have a strange relationship with responsibility. On the one hand, I take responsibility extremely seriously, and I truly believe that we are responsible for all reasonably foreseeable consequences of out actions, without exception. I hate it when people refuse to take responsibility for their actions and I have lectured people on the nature of responsibility and how it is not something you can just shed because you don’t feel like it many times.

On the other hand, I don’t exactly seek it out either. In fact, I tend to respond to the idea of purposefully taking responsibility with a deep kind of claustrophobic panic. I am definitely the sort of person who will turn down the power rather than take the responsibility.

Not very mature, I know, and probably not in my best self-interest either. So I am working on it. Leaning into the panic in order to get to the other side of it and figure out where to go from there. A lot of fears disappear when fully expressed, and then you find yourself on the other side of it wondering what the heck you were so scared about.

That’s a good feeling, once you get over the disorientation. It means you have to change your beliefs, though, so a lot of people never get there. People would rather stay miserable than even entertain the idea that how they perceive things might be in error.

And yes, that holds true for us “open-minded” artsy fartsy liberal intellectual types too. Despite how often we airily assert that other people should really be more open-minded, we’re generally no better than anyone else at challenging our own perceptions.

And that definitely includes me. The best I can say about myself is that I don’t fight the truth once I perceive it.

It’s the perceiving part that’s hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s how it sounds.

I have been trying to teach myself one of the six versions of the International Phonetic Alphabet today, but it’s a bit of a struggle.

See, the prof left a list (on the source website) of links to various websites we could use to help us learn the IPA we are using in class plus the boring mouth position stuff. This gave me (as it turns out false) hope that I would not have to generate my own exercises. I could just let a website do that for me.

Alas, no. All the websites linked to were terrible. Not only did they look like they had been created twenty years ago, but none of them actually had exercises. Instead, they had tutorials, and those are of no use to me because I have already had the tutorial for the subject – it was called Linguistics class. Now I need help with the practical.

The closest thing to useful was this “program” that said it could generate three different forms of exercise… if I was willing to hack a dozen HTML files in two dozen places to make it work.

That is, to put it lightly, an incomplete solution. I don’t lack the skill to do it – I know basic HTML – I’m just not willing to do extensive reprogramming just to make the damned thing work.

If I wanted to do that kind of thing, I would have stuck with Linux!

So, back to square one, I guess. There are probably more modern (and functional) websites that can do what I want them to do, and I will probably Google for them soon. But right now I am too disgusted and discouraged to do it.

And yet, because of the weird ways technology reprograms our brains, I now feel like I have to find a website that does it, because now generating my own exercises (something I was perfectly willing to do before investigating the prof’s list) would feel like defeat.

Dammit, I will make the world of technology do what it is supposed to do! The battle cry that drives nearly all technological progress, when you really look at it.

I am also having a problem with the exact IPA I am using. Right now, my best resource is this phonetic transcription website I found earlier. I was so glad to find it because it will be a huge help in making exercises for me to do and it gets everything exactly right for the IPA I am learning…. or so I thought.

But today, after feeding it a bunch of sentences then “reading” the phonetic transcription, I saw a symbol that I did not recognize and was not in my notes.

It’s the vowel sound in the word “long”. The symbol I get when I run that word (or anything else like it) is not in my notes at all, and what is worse, that sound doesn’t seem to me in my notes either, so I can’t even tell you what it SHOULD be.

This creates a rather vexing knowledge gap. I don’t know what the right symbol for that particular O sound is, and that means that if it comes up on Tuesday’s test, I am screwed. It must be one of the symbols I already have, but I can’t figure out which one.

And if, in fact, the chart in my notes is incomplete, when so is the official one on our course website. So I am stumped.

Oh well, I will pull through. whether or not I find a website with lots of exercises or not, I will somehow cram all the necessary knowledge into my brain. It’s just really irritating to have to deal with something which is illogical and incomplete like this.

It’s the vowel sounds that are hard to learn. The consonants are easy. Most of them are exactly how we use them in English (the symbol for the P sound is [p]) and the ones that aren’t have a clue (the SH sound’s symbol is an S with the lower half of a circle on top). The only counterintuitive one is that our J sound is actually J with the same half-circle on it (a diacritical mark call a hacek, pronounced “ha-check”). A plain J actually means our Y sound.

Yes, just like in Swedish.

But the vowels are killer. It seems simple if you just look at the chart, but when you are actually trying to transcribe, it’s hard to figure out what you are dealing with. I personally find it very hard to separate the vowel sound from its inflection. To me, the vowel sound in, say, “that” can sound very different depending on how it’s inflected in the word or in the sentence.

But according to the IPA we are using, all those inflections are attached to same vowel sound, and it’s hard for me to hear it. and I have a lot of trouble imagining uninflected vowel sounds. So it is going to be tricky for me to learn to use the right symbol.

Or read the right symbol, come to think of it.

Still, I am enjoying the process.

Went to see Zootopia last night with Joe and Julian. Loved it. I was so happy by the end of it that I felt like I was drunk or stoned. But there was this one scene…..

In it, the fox character, Nick, tells the story of how he was very cruelly bullied for being a predator and trying to join a Boy Scouts type organization. The people there lead him to believe he can be in the group, and he gets his Mom to buy him a brand new uniform she can barely afford because this time, for once, he was going to fit in.

Instead, they turn out the light, beat the shit out of him, and tell him he was an idiot for ever thinking they would let a predator join.

That’s pretty traumatic for anyone to see, but for me…. a fox… who thought he was learning to fit in as a Boy Scout only to have a bully tell him in no uncertain terms that everyone in the troupe hated him and that if he ever came back, the bully would beat him up….

Well, let’s just say it was triggering as hell. Just thinking about the scene in the movie brings it all back to me.

Holy shit, I had a horrible childhood. And everyone I told about it brushed me off because it was easier to do that than deal with me.

Looks like I have more of my past to process.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.