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.