I had thoughts. And now they are gone. I really should write this stuff down, but…. when I do, the energy dies.

And there’s no point in writing it down if there’s no energy left to write the damned thing.

I am pondering my options re : education. I am losing faith in KPU as a quality institution, and so now I am wondering if I should go elsewhere after I finish this semester.

Pursuant to that, I submitted an inquiry to VFS to see if one year of education at KPU is enough to qualify me for their Writing For TV And Film one year intensive course. I still want to be a TV writer, and I would drop KPU like a hot potato if I could go to VFS instead.

I talked about it in therapy today. I have reached the point in my recovery where I am capable of truly seeing my own value and wondering if it would be better served elsewhere. Both the writing profs I have had are blown away by my talent, and dropped hints that maybe it would be better served in someplace a little more prestigious than KPU.

I’m sure they don’t imagine me taking that to mean I should write for television, but still. Clearly, I got something going on. I got 19/20 on my short story and 5/5 in the recent exam. My mark for the course is going to be through the freaking roof. Who knows, I might be able to wrangle a scholarship somewhere with marks like this.

And this time, I will not fuck up by doing a really half-assed job with my final portfolio, like I did last semester. I still feel like kicking my ass for that. My mark for that course could have been an A+, but my final portfolio was a mess and so I got an A- or B+ instead.

Tsk tsk tsk! But I can get glowing endorsement from both Nicola Harwood and Kathleen With (actual name), and that has to count for something.

Up until now, I was just happy to be going back to school. That’s the kind of low bar I used to set for myself. But now, well…. it’s not like I looked at many institutions and decided Kwantlen was the best fit for my lifestyle and career plans.

I knew it was close, so I went there. Sort of like when I went to UPEI. (Well, that, and my parents wouldn’t pay for anywhere else. Such love. )

And I deserve better. I should at least be weighing my goddamned options, at least. My marks are pretty good. I am obviously highly intelligent, which has not been an asset in the past but I am pretty sure that it would do me good in a university admittance interview.

Honestly, I have no idea how my intelligence comes across to people. I have maintained a kind of innocence about the whole thing, and that has left me ignorant. I have never been interested in claiming my power before now. Like I have said before in this space, it frightens me, and makes me feel like if I was to truly claim it, I would lose my freaking mind, or at least become an asshole type person.

But I am slowly moving away from that kind of thinking. I am increasingly willing to entertain the idea of being fearlessly myself without worrying so much about how others are going to take it. Certainly, this weird combination of genius, shyness, and innocence isn’t working out for me. I have to lower the blinders and at least become aware of the effects of my intellect on others.

That doesn’t mean I have to become all power hungry and manipulative. But it does mean I have to do the one thing I have dreaded for such a very long time : accept that I am, in a sense, above others.

Even typing that hurt like hell. I don’t want to be above people, or below them either (though that would be easier to take). I want to be on the same level as others, so we can deal with one another on a human level. I don’t what all that status bullshit getting in the way. I don’t want to struggle for dominance with anyone. I don’t want to touch all that odious envy and resentment. The very thought of getting tied up in all that make me feel physically ill.

But that doesn’t mean I am immune from its effects. And the more I think about it, the more it seems like this willing blindness costs me a lot more than it appears on the surface. By acting as though that stuff does not exist. I end up giving off a really weird and potentially alienating vibe. Other humans (back off, I still qualify) are aware of and are part of the whole status scheme, from alpha to omega, and so for me to ignore it makes me seem as weird as someone wearing a parka to a barbecue.

And so I end up achieving the opposite of the intended effect : I end up further apart from people.

But I still can’t imagine how to handle it. I can neither willingly dominate or tolerate submission. I don’t particularly want to be in charge, despite that being the way my skills and aptitudes lead me. And while I have no need to be the biggest cock in the room, I can’t stand the thought of someone thinking they can control me, or ignore me.

So what do I do? Do I just accept that I am going to end up in charge (in my own mild way) wherever I go? The idea of it horrifies me, but it might be my destiny whether I like it or not, so it might be best to just accept it and learn to live with it.

At least I have my friends. My good, good friends. I can be equal with them. They know me, they know what I am capable of, and they know what a first class doofus I can be too.

Felicity, Julian, Joe…. I love you all so much.

You are my lifeline to humanity.

Never let me go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In a minor sort of way.

Part I : When I leave for my Canadian History Since 1867 class, it is rainy and cold. That means that I have to struggle with the very fussy and sensitive zippers (there’s two on the same track) in order to make my kitbag waterproof. That’s never fun. The zipper does not close very tightly, so the slightest pressure can make it split open like an overripe cantaloupe.

Then I get to our stop, reach into my pocket for my toque, and…. it’s not there. I seem to have misplaced the damned thing again. So now, not only do I have to wait outside in the pouring, freezing rain for my bus, said rain will be falling directly on my head.

Needless to say, I was feeling cranky.

Part II : I get to class right before the professor starts class. This is good in that it means I was not, technically, late. But it’s bad in that I had no time to fill my water bottles (I have a bunch of 500 ml bottles I used for that purpose) and so I have nothing to drink.

And I like having something to drink during class. It’s a small, pleasant ritual to sip water now and then, and I find it helps me to keep my mood balanced.

Then I remember the bottle of Sparkling Ice (a carbonated fruit juice blend) I have had in my bag for a couple of weeks. Perfect, I think. I will drink that. I fish it out of my bag, and absentmindedly open it while trying to concentrate on class.

Kasploosh! The damned thing erupts like a startled volcano and shoot red juice blend all over the place. On my notes, on my desk, on my tablet, and especially on me. I guess being in my bag for a couple of weeks subjected it to enough jostling and wiggling that it built up a lot of pressure from the released carbon, and today, I released that pressure rather spectacularly.

So not only do I have to go to the men’s room on the opposite side of the building to get paper towels (and thus miss minutes of the lecture dammit), but I don’t carry a spare shirt with me, so I have to spend the rest of the class (and the bus trip home) in a shirt with a red stain so big there is far more stain than non-stain on my front, feeling like a prize idiot.

My notes are mostly okay. I know from bitter experience that there is no point in trying to actively intervene when you spill liquid on your looseleaf. Anything you do will just cause things to fall apart. All you can do is take out any pages that got wet but don’t have anything on them yet, leave the binder open to dry, and learn to live with the results.

Part III : Class was great, as always. I got to impress my prof with my thoughtful and articulate analysis of the Cold War practice of persecuting homosexuals in government because they were thought to have a “weak character” and be a “security risk”. That bullshit was just a way of encoding people’s prejudices, I said, which impressed him.

I also dubbed it the Pink Scare, which also impressed him. I am so gosh darn smart.

But then I had to get my sorry ass back home, and that meant going out in the rain again. Rain that was falling just as hard as before, but was colder because it was dark. And still no toque, so it was still falling directly upon my benighted noggin.

I missed the first bus, or maybe I didn’t but I was not included to hang around to see if the 6:41 bus was going to arrive late. So I went back inside and played my game (Crashlands!) for like, 20 minutes or so, then headed back out to try to catch the 7:16.

And because I am paranoid, I went out at 7:10, which meant six or so minutes of being rained upon in the dark and the cold.

So when I got home, I decided tonight was the night to order in and eat fun food. I honestly need the reward to offset today’s crappy aspects. So I ordered from Pizza Hut (my go-to place recently) and I’m going to eat pizza, drink Diet Coke, and relax.

Not for too long, though. I also wanted to get going on my Linguistics homework. I am not going to wait to the last minute on this one. Phonetics is not as bad as syntax, but there’s a lot to learn and it is not the kind of thing I can just absorb passively.

Food’s here. Ya know, the nice thing about cash is that you don’t have to swipe or sign anything. Anyhow, I shall continue.

And I am determined to master the phonetic alphabet (north american version). I find it inherently interesting enough that I want to learn it just to know it, and next Tuesday I am going to be tested on it anyhow, so I better damned well learn it.

I also have to learn a bunch of stuff about how the various English phonemes are formed in the human mouth. Both vowels and consonants have their own (separate) sets of parameters depending on where in the mouth the air is stopped, how it’s stopped, is it nasal or not, is the tongue tense or loose, and so forth and so on. And each phoneme occupies a unique spot on its chart.

Which is all wonderfully taxonomically efficient, but boring as well. I honestly don’t give a shit how it’s formed. I’m into language, not the physical machinery of speech.

But I have to learn it anyhow, which is why it’s good that there’s homework and exercises to get me through.

Oh, and I got my mark for the story I did for Creative Writing class. You know, the one with the Ancient Caterpillar and friends?

I got 19/20, which is basically arts class for 100 percent.

Because I am just that fucking good at writing.

I will write to you people again tomorrow.

That’s what I feel like, more or less.

Not in a really bad way. I’m not ill or anything. I don’t have that poisoned feeling I get sometimes. My mood is good, not great, but good. I am happy.

But I feel kind of messy and disorganized inside, so let’s time to type stuff out until the place looks at least halfway decent for a change.

It’s not that I like things messy…. not all the time, anyhow. It’s that I lack the motivation, focus, drive, and to a small extent the skills to clean stuff up and keep it clean.

And it can be said that I don’t like it when things are too clean in my home environment. I prefer my environment to have that lived-in kind of feel. Like a home, not a hospital room. If I ever have a partner who is very neat and clean, I would have to make a serious adjustment, and fast, before I turn into spaghetti-flinging Oscar Madison from the end of The Odd Couple.

Stop removing all traces of my existence dammit!

I noticed that the hotel that hosted VancouFur had signs everywhere telling us that they had “executive hotel apartments” available, and I thought that was interesting. I know that in Europe, and possibly in Japan, executives above a certain level expect to stay in an apartment, not a hotel room. It makes sense, in a way. Even the nicest, most luxurious hotel room is still a hotel room. It still has a somewhat dehumanized feel to it, and it lacks the little home amenities that we all take for granted as being part of any home.

So in that sense, an apartment is much nicer (and thus higher status) than a hotel room. And for busy executives who travel a lot, something that feels more like “home” must be wonderful.

Of course, it got me thinks about whether I would enjoy the “apartment in a hotel” lifestyle. I think I would. It seems like the best of both worlds. I would have the comfy homeyness of the apartment, but I would also have people to take care of the cleaning and laundry and whatnot for me so I can focus on my writing.

It would be an oral-retentive writer’s dream come true.

I have been thinking a lot about that kind of life lately. It really seems like the whole school thing is bothering me more this semester. It all seems like way more of a drag. Maybe that’s because I have made it far enough down the road to recovery now that I am beginning to feel restless and want to roam free.

Or maybe that’s just a side effect of Spring coming. (Yes, people from the Island, spring starts in early March here. Not like back home, where it starts mid-April if we’re lucky. )

Regardless, I am finding the whole going to school four days a week thing to be increasingly hard. It all seems so pointless sometimes. I know there’s a point – like getting into VFS, for one – but a deep part of me wants to be roaming the world in search of laid back fun and interesting experiences. No plans, no goals, just living a pleasant life free of toil and strain and full of gentle adventure.

But that’s probably just the other side of the fence calling to me. It’s called to me all my life, but I have never listened. I was always too practical, too sensible, too logical, and above all, too chickenshit to ever do it. There’s been dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times in my life where I have heard the call of the road and felt wanderlust stirring within me, trying to get me to wander away from it all and seek my fortune in the big wild world.

But I never go. All my wandering, like much of the rest of my life, takes place inside my head. In my mind, I explore facts, opinions, ideas, connections, and above all, perspectives as I try my damnedest to figure out what is really going on in this world. And what to do about it.

I still dream of doing the actual wandering one day, but being so sensible, I will have to wait until I can afford it. Or someone else is paying for it, like a publisher, or the company I rep for.

I would make a great company rep. Not a salesman, because I don’t want to sell things unless I truly and sincerely believe in them. But I could be a rep, the kind that goes around to a company’s customers and sees how things are going, if they need anything, or have any complaints, or whatever.

Sounds like a nice life to me, at least for a while. Traveling on the company’s dime, seeing the world, and making a living doing it. Sweet.

We started in on virtue-based ethics today in my Ethics class. The main idea is that an act is virtuous if it is what a virtuous person would do. That seems like it’s begging the question, but the Greeks thought everything had a purpose (telos) and virtues (arene) related to that purpose.

A good knife has the virtue of sharpness, for instance.

And the purpose of human beings is the pursuit of Eudaimonia, which is often translated as “happiness” but is a broader term than that.

The whole notion is elegant but primitive, as one would expect from a theory from the dawn of philosophy. The concept of everything having a purpose is very anthropocentric and not really compatible with a modern scientific worldview. To have purpose, sometime must have a goal, and to have a goal, there must be intention, and to have intention requires a mind.

And what mind lends purpose to some grain of silica buried six miles underground where nobody will ever see it? What is the purpose of the Andromeda galaxy? What is the intention of a black hole?

Anyhow, enough cunting. I need a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, we are going to start out with the flash fiction I am writing for today’s Flash Fiction panel :

1.Eugh, what’s that smell? It’s like someone left yogurt out in the sun for a week then poured it onto someone’s army boot! It’s like someone threw up after a heavy meal of ice cream and sweaty socks! It’s like my nose is being dragged through the locker room of an abandoned dairy plant!

And for God’s sake, WHY IS IT MAKING ME HUNGRY?

(Yay, they laughed!)

2. Hey kids! Guess what? Tanya the Tiger’s spaceship has landed in Tommy the Tarsier’s back yard for another semester of fun! With the power of their special kind of love, as well as the fun games that the kindly old wizard Hotpants taught them to play, and the help their friends Harry the Hotblooded Hare and Frankie the Friendly Fox, Tommy and Tanya will battle to save their home, the magical land of Nopantsia, from the evil forces of Icelegs, the Wizard of Cold! So join us as the Fun Time gang explores life, love, and each other on… Sun Shine Lovers All Stars Adventures!

(They laughed again!)

3. Okay, I guess I should explain why the cops are here…it’s really just a silly misunderstanding. See, I was just innocently, um… BORROWING our neighbour’s 70 inch television when I guess I tripped some kind of silent alarm and the next thing I know, the cops show up and just ASSUME I was stealing it just because I was putting it in tge back of a windowless black panel van while my um… Friend Vinnie happened to be handing me the 500 dollars he owes me. And the fact that my pockets were stuffed with jewely and silverware was a total coincidence!

(Not much laughs but they enjoyed it)

(–)

Flash fiction is fun! But I am always left with the lingering feeling of wanting to back and finish the pieces, or edit them, or something.

I am back home, and sigh, back to reality. Struggling with the feeling I should have gone to more panels and done more of the other stuff too, like going to the video game room sooner than I did. I only got there a couple hours before it closed for the year, and everyone was playing this excellent game from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack called Quiplash…. except me, because my mobile device (aka my tablet) is too damned slow.

You see, in order to play, you have to point your mobile device’s web browser to the game’s website, and I couldn’t get mine to do that fast enough to join a game before all the slots filled up.

This was very frustrating, as the game was made for someone like me. Basically, people are given comedy prompts, like “worst time to be wearing stilts” or “best thing you can do in your car”, and then the players vote on what answer they like most.

So basically, it’s a comedy competition. And I wanted to play so badly!

This experience, and other times when my slow fucking tablet has proved to be a social liability, has solidified my resolve to use some of the rest of my education fund on a new tablet. One that is fast, modern, sleek, and reliable.

I might also get a smartphone. Or maybe just the smartphone. I am not sure. Maybe what I should do is get the smartphone and use it for a while, then see if I still feel like I need a tablet.

But I dunno. Smartphones are so small compared to my tablet, and I am a big guy with big hands and big fingers so I really appreciate the extra room. Plus I am an old man with eyes growing weaker all the time, so having a bigger text display area is also a good thing.

Then again, I would look pretty silly holding a tablet to my ear. Maybe I will get both.

Plus I still need a new wallet. All my important cards (ID, credit, Compass) keep falling out into my pocket, and I am terrified that one of these times I am going to lose something important. I know that it will be hard for me to choose a wallet, which is part of why I keep putting it off. Option paralysis and all that. But things are getting dire.

I had fun at the con. Got to talk to Marzi, aka Stuart Royan, for hours n’ hours. I only ever seen him at conventions, which is a shame, because we get each other on a level that runs very deep. We can talk for hours and not get bored. And we can pick up exactly where we left off after not seeing each other for half a year.

Laughed like hell doing Eye of Argon again. Having that and another version of the Turkey Readings twice a year makes me feel embarrassingly blessed. I quite like the alternate Turkey Readings (the Furkey Readings). In the original, at Vcons, people bid to start or stop the reading and that’s it.

But Tony Greyfox added the idea of being able to bid to make him read the bad fiction in whatever silly voice or under whatever weird rules we want, and that produces a much different kind of hilarity. We had so much fun making him read in falsetto, in a Scottish accent, as fast as possible, etc.

But it was the rules that were the most fun, like making him replace one noun in each sentence with “pants” (aka one of the funniest words in the English language) or making him treat all punctuation as periods, which made for a lot of very short, punchy sentence fragments.

I did two : read everything as if it is very naughty (lots of bizarre innuendo from that one) and “you’re very pissed off and everything you read is pissing you off”.

I admittedly stole both of those from improv classes.

Well that’s it for me for now, fuzzies.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

All of the stressful stuff is behind me and now I can relax and enjoy VancouFur!

Well, when I get there. As I type this, I am still at home and have not been to the con yet. I will try to be there for a panel at 5 pm that I want to attend. After that. I will register (I know it’s supposed to be the other way around, but according to the schedule, reg does not even open till 6 pm (???).

So what is a fuzzy to do but ghost that first panel? Answer : nothing.

Besides, I’m a fox, we’re supposed to be sneaky and naughty.

Part of me, however, just wants to take a nap. I am going to try to fight that part off but there are no guarantees of success. I could really use a bit of a lie-down right about now, and my bed is call me with its sweet song of not having to deal with reality for a while.

Had my little adventure today, getting myself to my eye appointment at Ironwood Optical. That was easy enough, I just had to get on my trusty 405 at the spot where I usually get off, Eckersley Road, and get off at the Steveston Highway stop. Delivered me quite close to where I was going.

So the only bad part was waiting for the bus. Because it was seriously raining out. No messing around, no piddling around, just straight up movie scene raining.

That meant I had to sit there in the rain for ten minutes or so. That was unpleasant. I entertained myself by trying to remember all the lyrics to this song :

Oh, and this one too :

Had Billy Joel on the mind, apparently.

The eye appointment went fine. The usual stuff. Is it better like this, or like this? Number one, or number two? Now I am going to shine a super bright light in your eye and tell you to look at various points in the room. And now, I put drops in your eyes to make your pupils dilate because it amuses me to make you look stoned. Er, I mean…. so I can examine your retina!

Didn’t have a hard time with the dilation this time. Thank goodness for overcast skies. Other times I have had it done, it has been a bright sunny day, and that rendered me almost totally dazzle-blinded and needing Joe to lead me to the car. Very irritating.

But this time it was pretty cloudy out and so all I experienced was being bothered more by the usual brightness of the world than usual and fighting the urge to close my eyes even five mins or so.

There is one problem, though. According to the receptionist, they can’t give me my glasses until April 26, because it has to be two years to the day since I last drew upon my disability vision plan. But there’s one small problem with that.

I haven’t used my plan in like, five years. It should be totally refilled by now. So I would like to know who got their eyes checked on April 26, 2014, because it sure as heck wasn’t me.

Oh well, worst case scenario, I wait for my glasses for almost two months. Big deal.

Then it was a quick trip to the local 7-11, and home. Now I am pondering how badly I want to go to that panel. Naturally enough.

Therapy went fairly well. I shared my recent crash and burn on the Linguistics test. Told him that I was anxious/depressed while I was failing the test, but as soon as that was over, I bounced back pretty quick. There’s nothing I can do about it now and we have moved on to Phonetics, which seems super fun to me and way way more my speed. Learn the Phonetic Alphabet^[1]? No problem, it’s just a table of symbols, I learn those pretty fast.

Plus I am genuinely interested in learning it. I think it’s super neato and I can’t wait till I can read and write it myself. So that’s no big deal to me.

And if I do well enough in Phonetics, I might even pass the course!

The only other complication to my unalloyed enjoyment of the convention is the fact that I have History of Popular Music tomorrow from 10 till 1 tomorrow morning. So I can’t get the early start to a convention day that I usually prefer. Oh well, the course is so damned fun that I can’t get mad about it.

If all my courses were as enjoyable as that one, I would never leave school. I would end up an old man with like, three doctorates or something.

Found out I left my tablet at the therapist’s office. D’oh! I don’t feel like taking the bus to pick it up today, so I will have to do without for now. Hopefully, I will be able to get Joe to drive me out there to pick it up tomorrow.

Migosh, this might lead to me actually reading for a change!

Oh, the optometrist found a tiny bit of diabetic damage to my retina. Which I am taking as a warning that I better smarten the fuck up about controlling my diabetes and get my act together. I sure as hell don’t want to end up blind! Plus, he said that if the blood vessels are weak in the eye, they are weak all over, so I might develop a problem anywhere, not just the eyes.

And I don’t want to end up losing a limb to diabetes either!

So I am going to order a new glucometer and strips, and get back into taking my diabetes seriously. No more fingertip testing though. That’s a dealbreaker. Whoever thought “Hey, we have this great invention that only requires people to stab the most dense nerve cluster in the human body multiple times a day!” was an idiot.

Well, I had better get going. As usual, blogging during a convention is not guaranteed.

I will talk to you nice people….. soon.

Learned more about Canadian history today.

Like, the AVRO Arrow thing. The real story is that the things were crazy fucking expensive. And nobody wanted a general purpose jet in the first place. The NATO powers wanted specialized aircraft for specific missions, especially bomber intercept (remember, this is before ICBMs) and so the Arrow was a crazy expensive plan nobody wanted.

So that is why is failed commercially. It’s not like without Dief the Chief mothballing it, it would have gone on to be a huge success story. That’s the problem with being so far ahead of your time. There isn’t even a market for your product yet.

However, it is true that the reason the whole thing was erased was because Diefenbaker didn’t stand up to the USA. The US said “Well we can’t let such an advanced plane fall into Soviet hands! You’d better just burn all the plans and schematics and such, just to be safe. ”

And Dief said “Um yeah, okay. ”

Oh, speaking of the good ol US of A, peep this : The British invented the International Phonetic Alphabet. A brilliant invention that allows researchers to record language exactly as it is spoken and is a great help to people learning new languages who want to get the pronunciation right.

But the Americans said “Ew, that’s British! That’s downright unAmerican! We have to prove our independence from the UK by doing exactly what everyone expects us to do, and that is to declare that the existing one sucks and we will make our own!”

So they did. But this is the United States here, so they are incapable of agreeing with anyone including themselves, so they didn’t invent one.

They invented five.

So there are actually six different International Phonetic Alphabets now, and you have to know which one you are reading before anything makes sense.

I am pretty sure the same thing happened with sign language, too.

Now let’s see, what else did I learn. Oh right…. Lester Pearson, our Nobel Peace Prize winning PM, invented peacekeeping.

See, Egypt wanted to nationalize the Suez Canal. Traditionally, England and France had controlled the canal, and profited from it. Which is only fair, because they built it.

But at some point, that excuse runs out of gas. To most people, there is an expiration date on “I built it so I own it and get to make money from it forever”, and I don’t consider it too greedy for Egypt to decide that because it was on their land, they owned it.

It was, however, stupid. Britain, France, and mortal enemy of Egypt Israel immediately invaded Egypt and seized the canal. And they were like, great! We did it! Everyone is backing us up on this, right? Right? Hey, where is everybody?

That’s when they realized that there was not a single chance they could pull this off. Without the support of the rest of NATO, they were surrounded by hostile powers. But they couldn’t just pull out right away without losing a lot of face.

Our glorious PM Lester Pearson found the solution : Canadian troops dedicated to peacekeeping would sandwich themselves between the Trilateral Dumbasses and the Egyptian military, and that way both sides could slowly withdraw without actually fleeing from the enemy.

It seems hilariously primitive to me, like taking the mirror out of your aquarium to keep your Japanese fighting fish from attacking his own reflection, but it worked. And just like that, Canada invented the UN peacekeeping model. Get between fighting powers and keep them separated until everyone can cool down and peace can be negotiated.

As we Canadians know very well, it is not always that simple. Sometimes the two sides never cool down, and us being there arguably keeps a situation from resolving itself. The two sides are isolated from one another and therefore the ground is quite fertile for demonizing the enemy and transforming them, quite irrationally, into the source of all your problems.

Boy, if these fucking Canadians weren’t in the way, we could wipe out those demons and everything would be wonderful forever!

But still, we have kept the peace all over the world with little thanks. Lester Pearson may well have saved the world from war a hundred times over with his invention of peacekeeping Canadian style, and gave Canada a unique role in the world that all Canadian could feel good about.

And we Canadians knew how important that role can be, because we were more or less in the room when Douglas MacArthur, that embodiment of everything that people don’t like about the USA, wanted Harry Truman to drop an atomic bomb on North Korea to end the Korean war.

Seriously. That’s what that man wanted. Truman was like “Fuck no!” and they feuded quite publicly about it. It ended with Truman relieving MacArthur of his command, which was inevitable.

But it was a real eye opener for us. It showed that some Americans were actually crazy enough to think they should do something like that. I think this must have been when we realized we had to watch the USA like they were a dangerous mental patient who might do something crazy at any moment, no matter how sane they seem.

Switching to personal history, today was a fine day at school. History class was groovy as usual. I think the fact that I have my Canadian History Since 1867 the day after Linguistics makes me appreciate it all the more, because in History, all I have to do is know things.

And I am so good at that!

I am also quite good at thinking, so Philosophy classes are no big deal for me. Well, unless I have to participate in a group exam like I did Monday. That was stressful for all of us.

I wonder if it’s less stressful for the girls in the class because they are more used to cooperating and have less hormonal weirdness going on between them to get in the way of cooperating?

Because for most guys, doing something cooperatively with unknown dudes does not come naturally.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

There is something strange in the neighbourhood.

So I show up for my creative writing class and there is nobody there but me and my classmate Connor. Not a soul. No prof, no students, nada. We were supposed to take a quiz,  talk about our short stories, AND start the Poetry section of the course today. Instead, it’s a ghost town.

The first thing I do is check my email to see if there is a “class cancelled” notice I hadn’t seen because I was too busy studying. Nope!

Then I checked the official course website. Nope, nothing there either.

And thus, the mystery. I cannot conceive of a theory that would explain these circumstances. If class was, indeed, cancelled, either all of us would be notified or none of us. It wouldn’t have missed the three of us would(another student arrived later). If it was some kind d of traffic issue., the students who live here in Richmond would have made it, and that’s at least half the class.

Was there a natural disaster of some sort? Did my class get abducted by aliens, and if so,  why did they skip ME?  They must know I would be totally down with the probing! Was the cancellation of class announced telepathically and I was on the wrong frequency?

If this happens with my Linguistics class at 7, I will be super pissed. I don’t mind missing today’s story quiz, but I was REALLY looking forward to putting this goddamned Linguistics exam behind me. I would hate to have it hanging over me for another week.

Oh, and just to add to the mystery, all the stairwell and emergency doors have been marked with a piece ostensibly masking tape with BOTH written on it.

Twilight zone music!

So I dunno. Maybe my professor sent out a class cancelled notice to an incomplete mailing list. If so, grr on her.

Meanwhile, I haveh threevhours to fill.

Time to diagram some more sentences?

(–)

Everything I learned was worthless. The test covered stuff from AFTER sentence diagramming and I didn’t understand any of that stuff. How could I when I didn’t even get the simple stuff?

Oh, and mystery solved. Turns out the prof organized a field trip instead of the class we were supposed to have and told us all about it.

In an email TEN DAYS ago.

Which was never repeated. And which I would have had to think to check the announcements from TEN DAYS AGO. There was no indication on today’s webpage, or any day’s except for the day it was announced (once). I had no way of knowing WTF was up.

Now I will admit, I did get that email. But the subject line was about some field trip with no mention of the fact that this field trip was what we were getting INSTEAD of a class. So I didn’t read the email. It didn’t sound like it would interest me.

So I blame her. Sure, maybe I should read every email she sends, but there’s no excuse for announcing it only once, with no reminders, and nothing on today’s webpage to give me the slightest inkling of what the fuck was going on.

And I’m not alone. Two others fell into the same trap.

In every group, there’s going to be clueless people like me. You have to take that into account or you’re going to end up with my situation, and making it a one time only fucked if you missed it kind of thing is downright heartless.

So yeah. Grr her.

(–)

Home now. As you might have guessed, I totally crashed and burned on that Linguistics test. And I was very depressed about it during the test, which might be why I did so poorly.

In fact, I am pretty sure it was. Looking back, it was mostly stuff I could have figured out if I hadn’t had by cerebellum hijacked by anxiety and depression. In fact, near the end, I was almost kind of figured part of it out. But then, of course, it was too late.

All of this brings me to a question I find very uncomfortable to think about : I am recognized as disabled by KPU and the province. Could I claim my condition caused me to screw up that test and get a do-over? Or a tutor? Or both?

I mean, it’s factually true. I would have done a lot better without my depression/anxiety. Not only would it have been easier to think while I took the test, I wouldn’t have needed pretty much the entire reading week break in order to recover from my depression caused by the previous tangle with syntax trees.

So factually speaking, I could make my case. But it feels all kinds of wrong. I am a deeply honorable person, sometimes to a fault, and to try to use the system to get a better grade just seems lowly and sleazy to me, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did it.

The fact that I have a solid case and might actually, on some level, deserve a higher grade means nothing to me. Fuck that shit.

And I know that isn’t very rational. It is, however, very me. And I am slowly learning that it is fine to be irrational.

In fact, sometimes it can be the most rational choice imaginable. No rational human being tries to pretend that all that matters is logic and reason and that we can somehow escape our emotional needs and our essential natures. Or like me, think I can always make the “smart” choice and bask in my own cleverness without their being dire consequences.

So it’s time to get in touch with myself. Find out who I really am, under all that mental machinery. Man (and woman, and whatever) can’t live by intellect alone, no matter what lunatics like Kant say, and it’s time I lived up to my own rhetoric and tried to live a more integrated life.

Time to put myself back together.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fun fact : this needle has three eyes.

You should see is blink!

Ahem. Anyhoo, I am safely on the other side of my Ethics exam. I got together with my partners in a study room in the Library (they got a bunch of them, it’s so cool) and we went over the stuff. And then another group joined us, which was surprising but rad. They even had flash cards with highly incisive and on-point questions regarding the material!

And while that was happening, I marveled at how I was doing a normal thing with normal people, and I felt fine. Well, mostly fine. The point is, it went quite well, and I am doing my best to emphasize that in order to make the most of this corrective experience.

I can hang with normal people (well, normal college students) and have it go fine without anyone looking at me like I am an alien shitting through his forehead while talking about making hamburgers out of your children. The cruel and traumatizing moments when I am “found out” as being weird AF and everyone withdraws from me leaving me socially isolated and miserable never came. We hung, we went over the material, and then we went to class. Simple.

Doing the damned group exam , on the other hand, was freaking excruciating. No shade thrown on my partners, though. They were great. It’s just that writing by committee sucks red hot donkey taint. Basically, we would come up with a sort of outline for the answer to a question , and one of us wrote it while the other two twiddled their thumbs and looked at the next question.

At first, the consensus was that we should NOT let me do any of the writing because mt handwriting is terrible. But I ended up doing the final question. No problem. My handwriting is bad, but ever since I ditched cursive and switched to printing, it’s readable.

Seriously. Fuck cursive. Fuck it in its curlicued asshole.

My study partners were surprised that I could take as many notes as I could using old fashioned pen and paper. Personally, I always feel like I am missing stuff because I can’t write things down fast enough and I have never mastered the skill of being able to condense things down to manageable size on the fly.

That really got me thinking about how I maybe should forget getting a new tablet and get a laptop instead. Then I could take notes like Luka (who tries not to act too proud) and save myself a lot of fucking around with binders and pens and such.

I have to admit, being able to organize everything on a computer would be marvelous. I am way better at keeping files on a computer organized than notes in the real world.

So I will look into getting a laptop instead. Having a modern tablet is less of a priority now that I have a modern computer. Take video games out of the picture, and my needs for a tablet are modest. I can probably get a cheap-ish one for the same price as I would pay for the tablet.

None of “just needs a new battery” crap, though. This thing will be NEW. Getting the new computer has shown me the enormous psychological value of having fresh, new, decent things in my life. It makes me feel like I amount to something and I am not relegated to the world in which the only things you can have are beat up hunks of junk.

Guess you can take the boy out of the middle class,but you can’t take the middle class out of the fully grown man. Middle class will always be the ideal for me, no matter how long I live in wretched poverty.

I found out some good news : the history exam I thought I was taking on Wednesday does not exist. I was mistaken. And boy am I glad! The needle has one less eye than it could have.

So now, I just have to survive tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day where I have Creative Writing (where I have that short story due) and then the dreaded Linguistics exam. I have the whole syntax diagram thing sort of figured out, and I am going to practice like hell before the exam.

It’s just a matter of internalizing the various rules of phrasing in English well enough that I am not stuck with situations I don’t know a rule for any more. That is what I am experiencing now.

After that exam, the craziness goes away… until the next day, when I have my eye exam, therapy, and VancouFur starts. But at least that is the fun kind of crazy. It’s going to be a little weird to be at the convention, then come home, then go to class (History of Popular Music, 10am-1pm), then go back to the convention.

But there are advantages to having the convention be like four blocks away from me. For one thing, I will be sleeping in my own bed…. possibly with guests. And if I get hungry, I have the option of just coming home to eat instead of having to eat out for every meal.

I will have to see what bus route will take me there. I know the 405 doesn’t turn onto Westminster, but the 401 does, and it is super frequent, so if I am lucky, I can bus there and back on the 401 without a lot of waiting.

So in a sense, not being able to get a hotel room is actually kind of freeing. We usually get a room even when the con is close by because it’s super convenient to have a room to store your stuff in and to retreat to when there is no programming on that I am interested in, and/or need to lower my social stimulation levels to sub-anxiety levels.

So I wouldn’t turn down a hotel room if one became available. But I can live without it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Good night!