Monthly Archives: April 2016

So now what?

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I’ve only been idle two days, and already I am bored, tense, frustrated, and out of sorts.

But tyou know what? That’s good. I cherish those feelings. They are a sign that I am still alive inside, and struggling to express what is inside me, instead of going numb.

I don’t want to go numb. I was number for a very long time. Barely alive, very little motile force, a pronounced lack of vitality. It was how I reacted to the position I found myself in. The path of least resistance out of the trap I found myself in of being unable to face the world at all.

So I went numb inside, and the thing is, numbness works to stop some kinds of pain. The pain of negative external stimuli. The pain of all the things in the world that remind you of how unhappy you are. The pain of the knowledge that time is passing you by and there seems to be no way to stop it.

But that numbness brings its own form of pain. The pain of deprival. The pain of dying inside. The pain of the isolation you feel due to your inability to connect to others. The pain that comes from the deep down suppression of all your desires except for the ones you can sate within your very, very tiny comfort zone.

The pain that comes from that last spark of vitality that keeps you alive screaming into the darkness of your soul and pouring its energy into trying to jump start your healing.

The pain of an unexpressed id.

The only hope of true escape lies in beating back the numbness, and that means accepting pain. You froze your emotions because they were painful, and that means thawing them out will hurt. Plus, there is the simple pain of waking up dead areas of your soul, the spiritual equivalent of the pins and needles feeling you get when waking up a hand or foot that has gone to sleep.

The difference is that depression convinces you that the pain of waking it up is not worth it, so you just get used to it being painfully numb.

Well fuck that. I am goddamned sick and tired of numbness. I will kick and punch and bite and scream in order to stay awake and alive, and if that means I get very frustrated and feel like a tiger in too small a cage, well then I will just have to find something to do in order in order to calm back down.

That means holding onto the anger and pain and fear and whatever else comes crawling out of the melting morass of my malfunctioning mind and suppressing the urge to suppress it, to freeze it again and put it back in cold storage. That’s the wrong way out. That’s the negative solution. That’s the course of action that leads to a massive net loss in happiness.

I am making the conscious decision to choose pain over inner death. Not forever pain, mind you. Just the pain that can only be alleviated by action.

That means choosing a path other than the one of least resistance. I am not a mindless agent without will who can only stand helplessly by as inner gravity drags me down. I am not water. I don’t have to seek the lowest level all the time. I can invest energy in keeping my inner fire lit. I can step on roads without knowing where they lead and figure out the way to what I want from where I am.

I’m not dead. I still function. I have a great deal of power within me if I have the will to use it. So far in my life, I have ignored or suppressed that power because I didn’t want to take responsibility for it. It seemed like such a huge burden that I felt like it would destroy me (somehow) if I was to embrace it.

Kind of like the classic science fiction/cartoon plotline where the villain acquires the massive power they seek, only to find they can’t handle it and it is tearing their mind apart so they have to give it up or go completely insane.

And what good would all that power do then?

I have always been drawn to that kind of story, and now I know why. I identify with it. Many times in my life have I felt like I was too smart for my own good. That I had more mental power than I knew how to handle, and felt the claws of madness digging into my mind when I tried to get a handle on all that mentation.

But now I know that those feelings are mere phantoms at the gate. They have served their function, which was to keep me mentally balanced, but now I am changing things and that means seeking a superior equilibrium, and that means those phantoms are going to have to step aside.

Business as usual is simply not longer acceptable.

I knew I had reached a new plateau when I played a very good entry in my all time favorite video game genre (collectible card game type games) all afternoon, and yet still found myself restless and discontent. That genre of game is extremely mentally engrossing (at least, if it’s any good) and can soak up my excess mental energy and surplus mental bandwidth like no other.

That’s why I love it so much!

But no, it’s no longer enough. The only thing that has quieted the beast is writing this blog entry. Clearly, I am divurging from my usual diversions, and will have to find something more satisfying than even my very favorite kind of video game to occupy myself.

I might actually have to become productive. Imagine that.

Friday morning, I have my last exam and that will be my official farewell to Kwantlen.

Dunno what will become of me without even that on my mind.

But I will come up with something!

And I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

What is effort?

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No, seriously. What is it?

Let’s say that there is a microchip they can implant in your spine that will exercise your body for you. You will physically do the exercise exactly as if you had decided to do it yourself. Same activities, same pain, same results. The only difference is that you didn’t have to go through with it yourself.

Most people would go for it in a big way. And if you asked them why, they would say it’s because it means you don’t have to go to the effort yourself.

But what is this mysterious substance that we call effort?

It’s clearly not about the pain. The pain is the same. And it’s not the strain either. That too remains the same. It’s not the getting sweaty, or being tired after, or the time it takes, or the boredom, or the muscle aches, or anything. All of that would be exactly the same.

And yet those are the very things we would cite as the reasons why we don’t exercise more. What gives?

There must be a mental resource that we consider finite and treat as precious that doesn’t really map to anything physical or even logical. Something kinda of like effort, sort of like willpower, a bit like chutzpah, but really a thing for which, as far as I can tell, we have no precise name.

Let’s call it “the wherewithal“.

And it seems to me that the question of exactly what it is we are talking about is extremely important because a lack of this substance or power is the single factor keeping us modern consumers from being the person we want to be.

My feeling is that it has something to do with serotonin. After all…. everything does. On a neurochemical level.

Some activities deplete our serotonin supplies, others preserve or even recharge it. Things like exercise, housework, or pretty much anything else that requires doing something we don’t want to do because it isn’t the steady stream of unalloyed pleasure (or at least, lack of pain) that modern society can provide depletes this serotonin (or whatever) and because this substance is the basic building block of our sense of wellbeing, our default behaviour is to hoard it and spend it very conservatively.

The physical manifestation of this is what we usually refer to as “laziness”.

The irony, of course, is that this attitude is all wrong. It does not lead to maximizing happiness. The best it can do is minimize pain, and because of how consumer civilization programs us, we tend to view pain as the enemy and a lack of it as a kind of victory.

This results in a mindset where he thought that some pain is actually worth it – that there are things which involve some pain but bring far more in pleasure than they cost in pain – has a hard time taking root. Pain acquires a level of fear and/or reluctance associated with it that is wildly out of proportion with its actual severity.

So a kind of unenlightened hedonism kicks in, where the idea of delayed (but vastly superior) gratification disappears over some seemingly distant horizon and people act in an almost robotic, mindless fashion, without forethought or purpose.

Why? Because they are so depleted by their lives that their basic needs (in this case, for that reward/serotonin) override their rational brains, and even very intelligent people engage in self-destructive behaviours that they know are stupid, but they don’t feel like they have a choice.

And in a sense, they are right. Evolution gave us big brains, but it also gave our bodies a kind of veto power over our powerful rationality. If the body’s needs are not met, it can usurp control of first our minds and, if things get bad enough, even our body itself.

That’s why it’s hard to concentrate when you are hungry or thirsty. Your body is raising the alarm and there is only one way to turn that alarm off – give it what it needs.

Back to our main subject. How do people end up so depleted in the first place? Let’s start with work.

Work involves a massive investment of that mysterious substance. So does school, to a lesser degree. Our simpleminded and hedonistic ids have to be restrained and forced into things every second of our workdays. So many primitive impulses (like, say, wanting to smack the crap out of one co-worker and mount the other) to suppress, so many stimuli to filter out, so much energy invested in dragging our inner children kicking and screaming through out day that it’s no wonder that when we get home, we don’t want to do a single thing that would take any wherewithal whatsoever.

As we mature, we learn to stop fighting ourselves and just do the things we have decided to do. And of course, exactly how draining your workplace might be is highly variable.

Then there’s diet and exercise. Yes, the very things we want to motivate ourselves to do. There is no doubt, scientifically speaking, that we are making bad choices. Not from the point of view of some moralistic purity standard, but from the purely selfish hedonistic point of view. Our tendency to try to solve emotional issues via consumer purchases, coupled with our depleted states and consequent lack of rationality, leads to a string of short term solutions that in many ways just makes our problems worse over time.

By trying to fill the hole in our souls by cramming things into it, we only make it bigger.

I don’t have a ready solution for this problem, but all solutions begin with the same thing : awareness. If more people knew what was really going on inside them and what they were really up against, maybe they could find ways of making themselves happier in the long term. At the very least, they would find it easier to motivate themselves to do the less-fun things in life if they knew that they were not just deferring pleasure, they were investing it in being a richer (happier) person later in life.

So don’t go to the gym thinking “I want to be hot!” Don’t eat fresh fruit instead of a donut thinking “I want to be healthy!”. Don’t spend time reading instead of frittering away your time on things you don’t even like that much thinking “I want to be smarter!”.

Our inner selves don’t care about that shit.

Say to yourself “I want to be happier!”.

That’s something our ids can understand.

I will talk top you nice people again tomorrow.

On The Road : Specialness edition

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Usual place, usual space.

Warning, none of the following truths are gentle.

All my life, I have known I was special. Different. Unique. Many times in my early life, I was told I had so much potential it was scary. I have grown up thinking I was really something special.

And I am. So what? That and five bucks will get you a Starbucks coffee.

Specialness is shit. It has no inherent value. In a world where everyone is special,specialness is the cheapest thing imaginable.

In the real world, specialness doesn’t mean shit. You don’t get marks just for showing up, Nobody is going to show up and hand you a check for a million dollars “just for being you”. Nor are they going to give you a free pass for unlimited pussy (or whatever) just for being such a nice guy.

All society cares about, like the man says, is what you can do. And that’s not the world being cruel or cold to you, it’s exactly what you expect of the world.

If someone knocked on your door and said “Give me your brand new Bluray player!” and you said “Why?” and they said “Because I’m such a nice guy, and I have a lot of potential!”, you’d laugh and slam the door in their face.

See how it suddenly changes when it’s your stuff on the line?

And let me tell you, a lot of people waste a lot of years waiting to be rewarded for their specialness without having having to do anything. On some level, they feel like having to do something for their reward means they lose and life wins.

Wins what? The battle to make them do something in order to get something and thus deny their inherently wonderful extra special specialness. It’s a battle that is absurd on the face of it and absolutely unwinnable, and of course, most people don’t know that it was they are doing.

But they are. Take it from someone who knows. They waste years upon years waiting for life to make the first move. Like some cosmic agency is going to show them exactly how to get to happiness without effort or risk and then they will just do that. Like life should be without struggle or risk, and anything else is cruel injustice.

Like they expect to win the lottery without ever buying a ticket.

So you know what? Fuck your specialness. And mine…. especially mine. Society, with the best of intentions, fed you a false narrative that because you were special and unique and wonderful…. that’s all you would ever need to be. Nobody said that you would actually have to do things. Things like taking risks, investing effort, making yourself vulnerable to the world, and fighting like hell to get what you want.

School was great. It was clear that the system liked people like you. You were the right kind of person in school. And whether you worked hard to get those high marks, like a lot of people, or just took them for granted, like my lazy ass did, it was clear that you were destined for greatness, or at least respect.

But nobody told you about the fighting, and the struggle, and the stress. Why, you will just major in your favorite subject from high school and get a job in that! And that will lead effortlessly to a job doing that exact same thing, and you will love that job so much that it won’t even seem like work.

Nobody told you that all those academic degrees like art history and English lit can only lead to one career, and that is teaching it to other idiots like you. And that you will be competing for those tiny numbers of jobs in your field with hundreds of your fellow idiots, so it’s either become the Type-A competitor you have never been, or resign yourself to getting the exact same kind of job you could have gotten without going to college in the first place.

And should you get one of those kinds of jobs, you know, the sorts of jobs anyone can get, it will only be a matter of time before it occurs to you that maybe, just maybe, you aren’t middle class any more, and suddenly you won’t feel special at all any more.

That will be your crossroads. In one direction lies depression, self-loathing, self-destructive behaviour, and feeling like a colossal loser. On the other path lies ambition, drive, passion, and a healthy sense of self because you have decided that you are special, god damn it, and you are going to prove it.

Luckily, it is never too late to change the road you’re on. I am living proof of this. I languished on that first path for twenty years simple because I was unable to grow up and face reality and accept that I really did have to do things that were scary, uncertain, and difficult if I wanted to change my situation. I had to take responsibility for my own fate, and push myself to find the place where the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was small enough for me to jump across.

As it turned out, that was Kwantlen.

And maybe you are reading this and thinking I am mean and sadistic and a total prick. That’s your right. You can totally throw all your hate and anger at me and convince yourself that I must be wrong about everything and a horrible evil person besides.

I just want you to ask yourself this : Why am I so mad? What is it about what I have said that makes you so furious. There’s lots of opinions in this world with which you disagree, many of which are far more evil and offensive than anything I have said here tonight.

So what is it about these particular statements that makes react so strongly?

You’d better figure out what it is if you hope to defeat me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last three prompts

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Well, this is it. I have been saving the last three prompts from my Final Portfolio for Creative Writing for a day when I really didn’t have time to blog, and this is it.

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Oh, and just so you know, Ididn’t follow all the prompts exactly. Sometimes, I changed bits around so they would be more fun.

Prompt 2 – Monster Under The Bed

When you were little, you could swear there was a monster under your bed–but no one believed you. On the eve of your 30th birthday, you hear noises coming from under your bed once again. The monster is back and has an important message to deliver to you.

The night before my fifth birthday, the monster under my bed started talking to me.

He’d never said anything before. All he’d done was making strange noises that sounded like someone turning their radio dial back and forth over and over again. Little bits of what might be words, but what also might be nearly anything else. It was impossible to tell.

And of course, I tried telling people about him, and of course, nobody believed me. But I didn’t really mind. It just made me feel like he was my monster and nobody else’s.

I didn’t really want to share him with anyone anyhow. I liked going to sleep listening to the sounds he made. It was soothing, and it gave me the best dreams.

But then, that night, he started using words. Small words all by themselves at first, but then bigger words, then sentences, and then he was making sense just like anyone else.

He said “Good, good, we’re finally making contact! Ahem…. ATTENTION EARTH LIFEFORM. I am Telepathy Engineer Stratus-5-ELBO. It is my sad duty to inform you that within seven hundred orbital rotations of your life-rock, your planet will be bombarded with a form of radiation as yet unknown to your knowledge-field. The effects of this radiation are unpredictable, but it is known to cause insanity, rage, uncontrollable lust, and a powerful desire to destroy. This radiation has been known to destroy entire civilizations, and it is imperative that your people be warned of the danger in time to build the necessary shelters and protect yourselves before it’s too late! If you understand what I am saying, please indicate this by thinking a clear affirmative!”

I said, “Uh….. what does affirmative mean? “

He said “You mean to say you don’t know what an affirmative is?”

I nodded and said “and I don’t know what imperative means either. Or lust. “

He said “It can’t be…. the knowledges clearly state that no life-instance of insufficient mental complexity can even interpret…. wait. EARTH LIFEFORM. Please state your maturation status!”

My what? “I’m five!” I said proudly. I was only lying by a day. That didn’t count.

He said “And approximately how many of your solar orbits does…. I am being told that you are unlikely to understand that question. Switching protocols. Young maleform, do you know how old your progen…. um, Daddy is?”

I knew this one!” He is thir-ty years old!” I had just learned to count past ten, and I was extremely proud of the fact.

He said “Let’s see, that means the reproduction maturation process must take twenty five solar orbits. IMMATURE MALEFORM. We will contact you again in twenty five sola…. um…. ye-ars? Years! We will contact you in twenty five years. BE PREPARED!”

And now those twenty five years have passed. It’s the eve of my thirtieth birthday, and I am looking back at all the years in between, where I learned what imperative and affirmative and lust – especially lust- meant, and the series of relationships that always ended the same way, with someone telling me that they couldn’t stay with someone who never seemed to be really present, who they could never truly get close to, who always seemed to have something else on his mind.

They never understood (because I knew better than to try to explain) that everything I did was to be ready for the next message. All my schoolwork, the university I chose, the doctorate in exotic radiation I completed in record time… all was to prepare myself for the big moment.

And that moment is tonight.

I just hope they haven’t forgotten all about me.

Prompt 3 – Valentine’s Day

You bump into an ex-lover on Valentine’s Day—the one whom you often call “The One That Got Away.” What happens?

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. What are the odds? What are the freaking odds? What are the odds that I would bump into the man of my dreams (that I let slip through my fingers, goddamn it) on any day, let alone Valentine’s day?

And in some random A&P in upper Michigan, no less. A place I had never been to before and will never be to again. I’m just innocently driving to see a friend who lives in Windsor when I decide I need more Dove bars, candy corn, and Mandarin Slice (food eaten on road trips doesn’t count, okay?), so I pull into literally the first place I see that looks like it will have those things, and there he is.

Ray Traviato, looking angelic and perfect as always, subbing for a cashier who got into a car accident on the way to work (nothing serious, more of an insurance thing than anything else), and managing to make being a cashier seem noble, fulfilling, and fun.

Turns out he manages the store. Of course. People trust him implicitly on sight (I sure as hell did) and he never lets them down. There’s something about him that makes people eager to turn over the kingdom to him, and he is far too gentle and kind to ever say no.

Was that all I ever was to him? Someone who had asked him to be her boyfriend, and he was too kind to say no? Or was the problem me?

Because I know why I sabotaged the relationship like I did, being all petty and demanding and mercurial and impossible to deal with.

I did it because I couldn’t make myself believe he actually liked me. I mean, seriously. What could a demigod like him possibly see in flat-chested sports-obsessed little nutjob like me? The girl with the super high grades and a discipline record thick as a phone book? The tomboy punk in the leather pants, jean jacket covered in spikes, and earrings so big you could use them as anchors? The girl who couldn’t sit still, never stopped talking, and didn’t pay attention? The girl everyone assumed was a dyke (I disappointed so many butch girls back then) and everyone knew was a basket case who was sure to self-destruct at any minute?

What could a demigod like him possibly see in a girl like me? It had to be some kind of trick. It had to be pity, or a dare, or something like that.

So I ended up driving him away. And the sad part is that when he dumped me (very gently, of course), I actually felt relieved. Hell, I felt great. Finally, the world made sense again.

It was two whole weeks before I realized just what I had lost. And by then it was too late. He had transferred to a school in the city, my parents practically had me under house arrest, and there was no way we were ever going to see each other again.

Until today. Until fucking Valeltine’s Day. In the middle of nowhere. Completely by accident.

I mean, fuck me, right?

So I get my stuff (they didn’t have my Slice, but they had orange Faygo, which it turns out is pretty good) and nonchalantly get into his line and then when I see him, I am all “Oh, hey, imagine meeting you here, hey, how ya doin’?”

Like I hadn’t recognized him the instant I walked in the door and hadn’t been freaking out about what I was going to say to him the whole time I was shopping.

We must have talked for half an hour. Nothing major, just the usual boring catching-up bullshit people who only have the past in common do when they meet. But we kept getting interrupted by this guy who worked for him, some stockboy or something, who kept coming to him with what seemed like totally bullshit questions about bananas or pallets or something, and they would trade insults in a lighthearted way, and then that would be it.

And every time this happened, it would bother me more. Who was this asshole, anyway, and what right did he have to keep hovering around and interrupting us and joshing around with my former boyfriend and acting like a jealous love….

And that’s when I got it. That’s when it all made sense. Why I was the only girl in high school he had ever shown the slightest interest in. Why he had always seemed so unattainable. Why I had always felt maddeningly safe around him.

It was simple. He was gay. And I was the most boyish straight girl in Ellen Landers High School.

After that, everything was cool. I was super relaxed and we talked like we had been friends forever. Jason backed off, and we ended up hugging and promising to stay in contact with each other.

And you know what? I think we actually will.

Prompt 4 : Wrong Printer

You’re at work and you print something personal (and sensitive). Unfortunately, you’ve sent it to the wrong printer and, by the time you realize it, someone else already scooped it up.

To the person known to their beloved as “Nookums” :

If you are wondering what happened to that rather extraordinarily personal missive you decided to print out at work (no doubt for private enjoyment), I can tell you :

It printed out on my desktop printer.

And I am afraid to give you further bad news, but I read the whole thing. Normally, I would not dream of being so intrusive or indiscreet, and indeed, I would have normally stopped reading the moment I divined the extremely intimate nature of the document.

But in my defence, it was a very slow day in Receiving. And you have to admit, objectively speaking, that there are aspects of the – narrative, shall we say? – that make it unusually compelling.

Still, I felt compelled to write this building-wide memo to assure you that your secrets are safe with me. I have discussed the contents of your email with only one person, my husband, and he neither works here nor knows anyone who does, excluding, of course, myself.

Even then, I was careful not to include anything identifying. He has not read it, and he never will. He has only heard my account of the highlights, and that was only for the purposes of the sort of stimulation and novelty all long term relationships need now and then.

Thank you, by the way. It was quite an evening.

I do feel compelled to offer some advice, however. The activity the document described involving the fine bristled brush and a length of medical tubing is very inventive, but please make sure that all surfaces involved are thoroughly cleaned before and after, and that you take things slowly at first in order to give everyone involved time to adjust.

Also, as a lawyer, I must advise against the activity proposed involving the entity referred to only as “Pappy”. While I confess I am a corporate lawyer and therefore not up to date on the criminal bylaws and statues of this particular jurisdiction, I can say with certainty that such things are at least a misdemeanour in most places on this side of the Atlantic, and even if they weren’t, there are certain activities where no amount of privacy and discretion can possibly be enough.

Still, thanks to you, I now know what a capybara is. So there’s that.

Anyhow, rest assured that your myriad proclivities will remain our little secret indefinitely.

Unless it’s you, Dave, in which case, fuck you.

The well is dry

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Or if not totally dry, it’s mostly just mud at the bottom.

Feeling sleepy and tired and logey today, so the words, they do not come easy. I honestly want to go back to bed. I have hit one of my sleepy patches and I feel very bleah.

But I will keep on doing my thousand words a day for as long as I can. It’s not impossible that I won’t have the time or energy to spare once classes start, and this long, long experiment in teaching myself to write by writing will come to an end, or at least be on pause for a while.

But I don’t want that to happen. No matter how much other work I have to do, I will still need to express myself directly like I do on this blog. Here, I can just spill out whatever is on my mind at the time, without filtering it or prioritizing it or organizing or any of that shit. And that’s invaluable for someone like me who always has a head overflowing with words that want to get out.

Writing this blog is the only way I know to relieve the pressure.

I honestly don’t know what this next phase of my life will be like. But I know it will make me better. Not just a better writer, but a more whole, confident, centered person who doesn’t feel so totally unprepared for the real world any more.

I am confident in that outcome because I know how much good Kwantlen did for me. I already find it hard to relate to the person I was before I went back to school. Hell, I have trouble relating to the person I was last semester. It really seems like that was someone else. A sadder, more broken, more incomplete version of me, that I love and want to care for, but at the same time, I am glad I am no longer him.

We will get through this together, old friend. I’m going to take us out of the darkness at long last. All those years of letting the days go by because it was all we could do to just make it through the day will come to an end, and we will gain the skills we have always wanted and, the biggest prize of all, employment. And with it, self-sufficiency.

I don’t think there is anything in the world that could do more for my self-esteem and general mental health than finally being able to earn a living.

And it will be amazing to go to prospective employers with a VFS diploma to use as proof that I can do what I say I can do. One of the worst things about going to job interviews back when I was still capable of doing it was the fact that I had absolutely nothing to offer employers in the way of proof that I was even capable of full time employment. No job experience, no diplomas, no certificates, nothing. Plus I had a lot of lost time to have to explain. It put me at a massive disadvantage before I even walked in the door, and when you suffer from social anxiety like I do, that’s enough to make it impossible to keep doing it for long enough for some employer to take pity on you and hire you.

My sister Anne told me that finding a job was about getting told no a million times before someone says yes. I was not cut out of that. I’m still not, not really, although these days I would be far more capable of turning on the personality and impressing the hell out of them that way.

I have great powers of personality when I turn on the charm. I am hoping to use that in the entertainment industry, which runs on personality in some ways. I still don’t have the actual social skills slash experience to use my charm as effectively as I would like, but there’s no way of getting over that except to go out there and get hurt, so that is what I will have to do.

Take your lumps and learn. That’s something jocks understand that nerds don’t.

And it will help greatly that I will have a role, namely that of student (or eventually, graduate). Roles help me immensely. That’s why my social anxiety was never an issue when I worked as a cashier/clerk for my uncle Sonny at his shop. I had a clearly defined role, so every social interaction with the customers was clear. I was the clerk, they were the customer, they wanted me to ring up their stuff or rent them things or whatever, and I wanted to do it for them. I didn’t have to navigate the murky and treacherous waters of personal, one on one interaction, where awkwardness rules and I never know who I am and my inner demons can easily persuade me that this person hates me and wishes I would just go away.

And that was all I needed, really. The role. I was quite good at that job, if I say so myself. And I do. I was personable, friendly, and efficient. And I liked the work. Like I have said before, to me, it comes down to people wanting me to do things I can totally do, and that, to me, makes it a highly pleasant job. I don’t find it humiliating to do that sort of work, like some people seem to, nor do I seem to encounter the Customers From Hell other people talk about.

So honestly, any small business that needs someone to run the cash register for them would be lucky to have me. Too bad I can’t prove it.

So who knows. Maybe I can dazzle some employer with my charm and my not being an irresponsible kid who is going to ditch work to get stoned with friends, and get a part time job downtown.

It would do me a lot of good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A fun Friday

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There should be a transvestite martial arts movie called Enter the Drag Queen.

The tagline could be “Watch this Dragon get their Drag On!”

So today, I went to VFS to go over some stuff with Patrick and sign a bunch of forms. The commute took around 45 minutes total. 10 getting to the Skytrain, 25 on the Skytrain, 10 walking to VFS. That means that in order to get my ass to class by 9 am, I will have to be out the door by 8:15 minimum.

I will probably leave at 8 in order to leave a buffer zone.

My biggest worry is not the commute (because, like, whatever, this is my dream here) but the fact that I have to do it during rush hour, which means being part of the commuter rat race, which will not be easy for an edge of the herd type like myself.

More importantly, it means I might not get a seat on the Skytrain. And while 25 minutes sitting down is a breeze for me (I just read a book), 25 minutes standing up could be…. problematic.

Luckily, I know from way back in the days when I took the Skytrain a lot (like, for instance, when I lived a block away from it) that if you keep your eyes open, a seat usually opens up eventually and you can sit your big fat ass down in it ASAP.

And there’s nothing quite like the pain of swollen feet to keep you alert to seating opportunities.

The walk from Waterfront Skytrain Station to VFS was easy. For one, it turns out it’s not six blocks, it’s four. And in that direction, it’s downhill, and fairly gentle gradient, although Richmond has spoiled me so that any gradient at all feels like I am in an Escher painting.

Once there (quite early, which is quite typical of me), I was able to tell the receptionist (and the super gay guy who apparently answers the phone) I was there. There was some confusion at first when they told me that Patrick’s office was in some building on Water Street, which was news to me. The last time I had been there, Patrick’s office had been in the same building as the writing program, 198 West Hastings.

But then again, since the first time I applied, Patrick went from being Senior Admissions Assistant to Director of Admissions, so…. no doubt that is why he got the new office. And hey, it can’t have hurt my chances to have the guy who fought to get me in the first time (only to be overruled by that prick Simon, who is NO LONGER THERE) become the head of admissions, right?

The big issue, of course, is the $3600 difference between what the government will dole out in student loans for one year and tuition at VFS. That’s a lot of money to come up with. Luckily, the school has set up a payment plan, so that I don’t have to come up with it all at once.

It goes something like this :

2016-05-10 $800.00 CAD
2016-06-30 $800.00 CAD
2016-07-29 $500.00 CAD
2016-08-30 $510.00 CAD

Even luckier is the fact that I can make that first payment from my savings, no prob. Then I will have 2 months to come up with the second payment. And I have a lot of avenues to explore in that time. I could look for a personal loan. I could ask to borrow from Joe.

Heck, I could even get a job. VFS is in the heart of downtown Vancouver, and there are tons of little sandwich shops and other lunchy places just between the Skytrain and VFS. I might be able to pick up an after-school shift or two in some little business there in order to pay VFS.

Or who knows, maybe VFS has jobs I could do themselves. I would happily work off my debt. I could answer the phone, do office gruntwork (copying, filing, and mail? Sure!), get coffee for people. I have no problem with that. It’s one of the benefits of having a flexible ego.

Hey…. I’m just happy to be here.

So I am not too worried about the money. I am confident I will come up with it somehow, especially given the fairly generous payment plan.

Plus, I am not exactly sure, but I think the amount the government kicks in because I am disabled and because I am low income will be applies to that missing money, so it may turn out that the gap is not as big as I thought. Plus I will, of course, look for scholarships and bursaries, but without a heck of a lot of hope in my heart, because the truth is, there’s not a lot out there for people who are not recent high school graduates and/or who are not pursuing normal type employment.

Who knows, now that I have a year of college under my belt with pretty good grades (especially if you ignore certain courses) will open doors for me. I can only hope.

For the trip back to the Skytrain station, I took the bus. Downhill is one thing, uphill is quite another. I probably could make it on foot, though I would probably have to rest on each block. But why put myself through that when I can take literally any downtown bus and have it take me to the Skytrain sooner or later?

Maybe when the weather is nice, I will consider it.

The basic deal is that I will have a three hour class from nine to noon, lunch from noon to one, and another three hour class between one and four, five days a week. So basically I will be going from five three hours courses a week to ten, doubling my workload.

No problem. I was getting bored anyhow.

We did the tour of the writing floor again. It’s quite small. But that’s the lovely thing about writing. It doesn’t take up a lot of room and it doesn’t need expensive equipment.

All you need is imagination, verbals skills, and the ability to type.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Three Hundred Seconds

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Modern consumer society does a lot of weird things to our brains as it programs us to desire instant (and therefore more profitable) gratification. This takes many forms, but nowhere is it stranger and more illogical than in our attitudes towards food and health in general.

Now I am not talking about how we all should survive on cabbage leaves and strained quinoa until we reach our ideal weight. Or how everybody needs to embrace jogging so they can live a longer life of jogging. I am not talking any of that pie in the sky (mmm…. pie) crap that the health food cult industry tries to sell you.

No, I am talking about the immediate future. Not six years from now. Not just in time for swimsuit weather. Not even tomorrow. Heck, not even this evening.

I am talking about five minutes from now. How will this make me feel five minutes from now? If I eat this donut, will I feel lousy after the sugar crash? If I eat those fries, will I feel bloated and gross five minutes from now? If I have this complicated coffee/dessert thing from Starbucks, will this actually help me with my day, or will it leave me feeling strung out and confused?

And the thing is, for must of us products of a consumer culture (emphasis on product), our minds instantly rebel at the thought of taking that into consideration. Instant gratification means instant. Not five minute or even five seconds from now, NOW. We automatically feel like thinking about how something will make us feel five minutes from now threatens our deeply entrenched consumer gratification system that supplies our need for reward, and so we shy away from the thought. We come up with reasons why we can’t or won’t do that. We do what it takes to make the bad thought go away. Myself included.

But peep this : what if it is the very things we do and eat that makes us need so much instant gratification in the first place?

Maybe every time we give in to the desires for an unnaturally strong artificial stimulus, we are accepting the terms of a very bad deal. We get a few moments of pleasure in return for feeling really crappy for a while, and we don’t notice this because to us, it’s totally normal?

We think of this kind of empty feeling as natural, and obviously some of it is, but a lot of is, I think, artificial.

What if the cure for the modern malaise is simply to stop eating crap? Would it make a difference? Would we be able to make the transition?

And again, I am not talking about some distant fitness goal that might as well be in orbit, it would seem just as attainable. And I am not talking about what you “should” do in some inane moralistic way that heavily implies that the real reward for healthy living is a sense of smug superiority. I am not talking about what your doctor, your mother, or the American Heart and Lung Association wants you to do.

I am talking pure selfish hedonism here. Pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, feeling good versus feeling bad. Would you rather spend more time feeling good and less time feeling bad? Is a minute of pleasure worth feeling crappy for two hours? Are we getting good value for what we are eating, or are we settling for less?

And why is it so hard to think about the subject? The logic is flawless. Obviously, if someone said to you, “OK, the deal is that you will feel really good for a second, then terrible for two hours…” we would say “Um, no thanks, that sounds awful.

And yet, we make that terrible decision all the time, myself included. That’s what consumer culture does to us. It make us dependent on instant gratification from superstimuli. So dependent, in fact, that it blinds us to the non-immediate consequences of our actions. We cling to our unhealthy foods and activities because it truly feels to us that it would be “impossible” to live without them, and without them, life would not be worth living.

But billions of people go on living without our modern luxuries every day. They don’t seem to think life is not worth living without them. So clearly, that can’t be literally true. If you didn’t have these things, you would still go on living.

Maybe the real problem is that modern society sucks the life out of us in a million little ways that we can’t even perceive because we are habituated to it. Our supply of happiness is drained away by everyday life, especially our jobs, and so we become dependent on these “safe” (in that they don’t threaten how we live our lives) megadoses of artificial reward in order to continue to function.

“Why do you stay in that cage?” asked the man. “It’s not even locked. ”
“Because the food is really good!” said the monkey. “And I have my cage set up just the way I like it!”

That’s an exaggeration, obviously, but it gets the point across. Modern life depletes us and we are, in theory, free to leave that behind (quitting your job optional) at any time just by changing our habits.

But we all know it’s not that easy. We are bound by chains of artificial need, and our entire worldview is shaped by that. We can’t see outside the cage, not because there is something wrong with our eyes, but because modern society has trained us not to look there because looking there makes us feel sad and confused, and why should we put up with that?

Even someone who starts, in many ways, outside the cage and just keeps going, like myself, stays in the cage to do it. I might see further than others and I might be less restricted that some of the rest of the monkeys, but I am still in here with you all the same.

I just have a spot with a view.

I will talk to you nice monkeys again tomorrow.

The envelope, please!

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Thank you…. and…. just a second, it seems to be stuck to the…. okay, here we go…. and the winner is…. ME!

I did it! I won! I will be going to VFS starting May 2! I DID IT!

I was even able to pay the deposit right away because of the money I had left over from my student loan. And I still have like $800 of it left! Plus $400 on VISA card.

I got the call (ten minutes early) from Patrick, and at first, he was saying stuff like “I want you to know how impressed we are with your perseverance…” and “the writing panel was really impressed with your writing samples…. ” and my heart was sinking because I was sure there was a very big “But…. ” coming my way.

But no, I got in. I am totally starting school there three weeks from last Monday. And needless to say, I am super fucking stoked.

According to Patrick, despite what I thought, there is still a shortfall of about $4000 between tuition and the maximum student loan in a year. And what bugs me is, I can’t confirm or disprove it, because I can’t find any mention of a yearly limit online. There’s a weekly limit (for those not living on social assistance, I guess) and a lifetime limit ($50K, which is about right for a Canadian student), but as far as I can tell, no yearly limit.

So IDK WTF. I will inquire further.

Assume that this shortfall is a real thing, and I have no reason to think it isn’t, I will have to come up with that money somehow. But I am not worried, there’s lots of avenues towards getting my paws on that kind of scratch. I could take out a personal loan, I could maybe find some of it in scholarships and bursaries and shit. I could arrange some sort of payment program with VFS (Patrick says that’s what they often do). I could sell my body on the streets.

Well, you don’t so much sell as rent.

I got a PDF of the student handbook, and three weeks (less two days) to read it, so I should be pretty down with it by the time May 2 rolls around. I can’t imagine it’s going to contain anything surprising, like “The dress code is leather pinafores and soccer cleats” or “every morning we renew our dedication to Molok, the Goat of a Thousand Testicles” or so on.

Damn I am a funny writer.

And I am not the only one to say it. The best thing included with the email telling me I am accepted was the letter from the writing department about what they thought of my writing samples.

Here’s the good stuff :

I have reviewed your feature film synopsis for Rising Light, your essay on the Acadian
Expulsion and your short story A Day at the Pond. First and foremost, may I say, I enjoyed
reading your material.(Emphasis mine. – Ed. ) It is clear you have the ability to explore the world around you through the
written word with a creativity to your work which, when properly focused, will go a long way to
help you in your career as a screenwriter.

After reading your synopsis for Rising Light, it is clear you have a passion to tell unconventional
stories and to shine the lens on people and characters often relegated to the sidelines in film and
television. Rising Light reads as Die Hard with gay leads and a romantic subplot – a compelling
and entertaining premise. Your research essay gives a solid account of events surrounding an
historical occurrence. This is not dissimilar to the skills required to build a plot for a screenplay.
Finally, A Day at the Pond is an imaginative and fantastical story with an intriguing band of
characters that you could certainly mine for further storytelling opportunities

He liked it! He really liked it!

A Day At The Pond you already know, of course. I am so glad they liked it. It’s quite literary, so I was not sure if they would “get it”. And the thing on the Acadian Expulsion you know too, more or less. The version I wrote for this blog is about the same as the one I wrote for class, the class version is just more academic in language and tone.

Not academic enough, though, ’cause I still got a C- on it. It’s a fair cop. I got so wrapped up in the storytelling that I forgot it was supposed to be a history essay and so… it wasn’t. I didn’t have a theses, or arguments, or claims, or anything.

Meh. Somehow, my grades at KPU don’t seem very important to me right now. In fact, that voice in my head I call “The Jagoff” is whispering into my ear that I should blow off those two exams I have left because hey… I’m in! KPU has served its purpose, and now it can fuck off and leave me alone!

But I won’t do that. For one thing, there’s my academic pride at stake. It would bug the hell out of me to know that I could have gotten a higher mark. Plus, at least for the History of Popular Music one, I want to see the prof again and would hate for her to think I ditched her or didn’t value her or anything like that.

Seriously, Jodi Proznick, it would kill me to make you sad. You are so awesome.

And with the Ethics one, well, it’s a group exam, and so if I skipped it, I would be letting down Luka (I’ve used all the lyrics to that song now) and Tuan, and really, what more does any Canadian need than the fear of letting the team down in order to goad them into proper action?

And honestly, I have three weeks worth of time to fill. WTF else am I going to do?

So I will do my last 2 exams like a good boy.

And I am a good boy. Really, I am.

Most of the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

Excited and nervous

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That’s how I feel right now. Here’s why.

Got a call from Patrick at VFS today. Nice chat. He is going to call me tomorrow at 3 PM with news of whether or not I made it into VFS.

And I am doing my best not to think about it too much. There’s nothing I can do to control the outcome at this point and developing expectations will not help in the long run so I am doing my best to keep myself in a state of suspended animation about it, ready for either outcome, and making no predictions whatsoever.

The first time I applied, I worked myself into a state of certainty that I would get in. And so, when I didn’t, it really hit me hard. I am guessing that I am just not the kind of person who can conquer the world with the power of positive thinking and unsinkable self-confidence. I can go on some serious ego trips, but at the end of the day, I am a practical, realistic, sensible person, and I can only truly be happy if I stay within at least spitting distance of a realistic point of view.

Otherwise, I become very nervous and feel like I am out of control and bound for disaster at any moment. I know from observation that there are people who make their way through life quite successfully without ever really focusing on the realities of the world, but to me, that’s lack dark voodoo magic. Like someone playing hopscotch in a minefield and miraculously not setting any of them off. Or someone walking the tightrope without even knowing it.

The only way I know how to relate to the world is to focus on the literal truth and go from there. And no mistake, that gives me a kind of power in the world that not everyone has. Being able to see things clearly and handle practical realities is the magic to some people. Myself included, compared to some. My never ending drive to find the truth and understand anything is an integral part of who I am, and in some ways, my only lifeline out of the hell of being trapped in my own mind.

I concentrate so hard on truth because it keeps me out of the void.

But others seem to be able to get through life just fine with a radically different point of view. So mine can’t be the only one that works, and whether mine works is open to debate as well. It could well be that, to be blunt, too much reality is a bad thing. That a healthy mind requires a safety cushion of whole or partial self-delusion to act as a shock absorber against the bumps in life’s road.[A] And all I am doing with my ferocious determination to see the truth at all times, regardless of the consequences to myself, is destroying the very things I might use to get better.

But that’s my road. It’s not the easy path but I suppose it’s the most honest. I have a lot of self-inflicted damage, but I also have a solidity and certainty to what I know precisely because I pursued my truth with such disregard for my own well being.

So, ya know…. there’s pluses and minuses.

And maybe that’s part of what makes me such a loner. I don’t want to participate in the social illusion. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, how I have the ability to simply step out of social reality at will and, in that sense, both prove I have a sort of power but also prove I am not, to a lot of people, safe to be around.

Because for people so thoroughly enmeshed in social reality that there is no difference between it and objective reality to them – to fish who have no idea water exists – you are not some kind of bold rebel when you step out of the frame like that. You’re just painfully disturbing and weird. You bother people on a level too deep for them to understand or articulate, and so all they can say is that you are “weird” (hardly descriptive, specific, or useful) and try not to be around you at all.

And if you have something that sets you apart visually, like you are short or hairy or fat, they will use this in order to punish you for disturbing them and to drive you away so they can go back to the their “normal” world.

And when you are desperately eager to please and be accepted, it only makes it worse, because then they don’t even respect you. Instead of a lone wolf, you’re an over-eager smelly slobbery dog.

Makes me wish, for the millionth time, that I had just given up on the whole hapless nerd thing and copped a major attitude. Said “fuck all y’all”, developed my own style, did whatever the fuck I wanted, and told anyone who had a problem with it to go fuck themselves sideways with a tire tool.

In doing so, I would not have been behaving all that unusually for a male teen, and I at least would have demanded respect instead of being a whiny, socially detrimental nerd who was grating to be around.

Maybe I would have ended up wearing mirrored sunglasses when I wasn’t glowering at people, daring them to mess with me. Maybe I would have been yet another angry teen male getting into fights with “punkass bitches who didn’t show enough respect” and would have ended up in and out of juvie or jail.

That definitely would not have helped. I know myself well enough to know that confinement of any sort would bring out all my crazy and I would probably have made things a lot worse for myself by escaping over and over in order to prove that nobody can confine me.

Kind of glad nobody has ever tried, to be honest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Historically, I have instead chosen to stay off the road completely. Not exactly an elegant or efficient solution.↵

Beast or burden

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Came across this article about not considering yourself a burden, and knew instantly that this is some shit I have to write about.

The fact that I don’t really want to talk about it is proof of this.

See, I am exactly the sort of person that the author of the article is addressing. I do consider myself a burden to others, and feel great guilt about it. I consider myself to be a liability to anyone who associates with me, and especially anyone who actually lives with me. And I don’t open up to people because I feel like I am toxic inside and exposure to the “real me” under the persona would both hurt people and drive them away from me.

Plus, to be honest, I find it very hard to believe that someone will actually be there for me when I reach out. There have been so many incidents in my life (especially my early life) where asking for help backfired and ended up just reaffirming my own worthlessness that I just plain stopped trying.

And not long after that, I stopped believing that help was even possible.

And it’s more than the fact that I have never been self-sufficient. I absorbed the idea of myself as worthless and unwanted from a very early age. I can’t remember a time when I felt truly appreciated and loved and valued. At best, I felt like it was okay for me to be around as long as I didn’t remind people I was there.

That’s a hell of a way to spend your formative years.

Of course, intellectually (yes, we’ve hit that part of the blog entry) I know that there are people out there who love me and value me and like having me around. But knowing and believing are two very different things, and I honestly can’t say that I believe it. Evidence be damned. When something is a deep enough part of your psyche, it is impervious to such a weak weapon as evidence and reason. It is bulwarked by the much more powerful force of the need for the psyche to maintain structural integrity. You can’t change that without more or less having to start over.

Or at least, it takes time to shift the structure away from that particular load bearing wall. Because it has to be done very, very carefully.

My self worth has risen considerably over the last few years. I can sort of believe that I have a lot to offer the world, as long as I don’t push it to far. I believe I am talented. I believe I am intelligent. I believe that I am a great writer. I can even, on a really good day, believe that I am fun to have around.

But deep down, I still feel worthless and terrible and toxic. I recoil in horror and disgust at anything that reminds me too strongly of myself. It’s taken a long time for me to even be willing to read something I wrote, and even then it has to have lain fallow for a long long time in order for it to no longer reek of “me”.

Makes editing kind of hard to do. This self-loathing.

I work to displace the bad with good, but healing is tricky when part of you, a big part, does not even think you deserve it. Depression is the only illness that forces its victims to blame themselves for it. I know it’s not my fault and that I was a victim of a pretty lousy childhood. I know that it’s a result of a lot of trauma and isolation and other bad stuff.

Yet I still blame myself. Like I said – knowledge and belief are often very far apart. Deep down I still hate myself. Even in my best conception of my self, I still feel like I have to prove to the world and to myself that I am worth something. That I can justify my existence. That I am not, in fact, a massive liability on the world.

I suspect a lot of people in the entertainment industry are dealing with the same kind of issues. The world is run by people with something to prove, after all.

It is hard for me to actually imagine being okay with myself. I have been apologizing for my own existence since the day I was born. I honestly don’t know what it is like to feel sufficient unto myself. I try to imagine myself wealthy, powerful, influential, universally hailed as an unparalleled genius, and a genuine force for good in the world, and it all sounds marvelous, and I would enjoy if greatly, but the thing I can’t imagine is any of that changing that certain fundamental variable of my basic self-worth.

Maybe there are people in my life who would be glad to help me. People who sense my pain and my damage and really wish they could do something to help with my burdens, but I just won’t open the door for them by asking for their help. Maybe it would be kinder to others if I let them help me.

But deep down….. I don’t even believe that is possible. I can’t make myself believe that it is possible for someone to truly help me. I guess that hope was extinguished a long time ago. All I can imagine coming from letting people in to try to help is them getting hurt and having some of their own joy destroyed before they leave me completely in order to get some distance and try to get their own heads back together before they end up just like me.

That sounds like it is probably insane. But I can’t think my way out of it or around it or whatever. Not yet. Not all variables are open to being changed via an act of reason. Some of them can only be changed through hard emotional work.

I know there will be a time when my variable does change. And I know that at the time, it will seem like a revelation, like something I should/could have realized a long time ago.

But I’ll know that shit ain’t true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.