Well that’s it. My time at Kwantlen is officially over. Took me around 45 mins to do the exam (and it would have been even less if the listening portion (where we identify songs and stuff) didn’t have to take so long) and then it was home again by 9 am (ish). So now I am home, and I have to deal with the fact that my second home, Kwantlen, is behind me now.

I always get emotional at times like this. It used to surprise me, but not any more. I am not exactly a world champion at letting go of things, and even though I am super stoked to be going to VFS, saying goodbye to good ol’ Kwantlen makes me sad.

End of an era, I guess. The era was only eight months long, but I have changed so much over those eight months that it seems like a long, long time.

When I first stepped into KWantlen (Richmond Campus), I was fragile, anxious, timid, and unsteady. Going up and down the staircases to get to the main building (because the only way to have underground parking in Richmond is to declare the second floor to be Floor 1) seemed incredibly taxing, and it was all I could do to keep it together and make it to my classes.

And then there was the whole drama with getting my student loan. Half of that was my fault for not getting the wheels in motion sooner. But I had so much going on emotionally that it took me a while to find the mental space to worry about it.

The other half is, of course, irrationally and gobsmackingly slow bureaucracies. Six weeks to get my photo ID! Six weeks for them to process my disability status form, which they had to do before they could completely my application! That’s twelve weeks, AKA three months, spent just waiting for stuff.

Maybe it’s more than fifty percent their fault, come to think of it.

But Kwantlen was nice enough to wait, and then I got financial help from my sister, and then the loan finally came through after my first semester classes were already over.

It was in the second semester that things really began to change. I remember the moment things changed vividly. I was stressing out as usual about the upcoming semester during the winter break when suddenly things shifted and I said to myself “Wait a minute…. I got this! I’m not going to be doing anything new or different. I will be doing the same things I just finished doing. I have this handled!”.

And just like that, I relaxed in a way I hadn’t done in decades. I stopped stressing about it and confidently entered my second semester with full confidence in my ability to handle it.

It’s impossible to overstate what a huge difference that was for me. It had been a long time since I had done anything with that kind of confidence. My overactive and neurotic mind would produce panic and anxiety over patently predictable things. I lived in a constant state of fear and low level paranoia. No wonder I was so miserable!

And my self-confidence has only grown since then. It’s a slow and unsteady process, to be sure, but every day, I believe in myself a little bit more.

Having been accepted into VFS, and having the writing dude say such nice things about my writing, helps a whole heck of a lot. At last, there are people out there who believe in me. I had lived for so long in a state of suspended potential that I had forgotten that was even a thing. I did my best to believe in myself, and certainly I did well enough in school – Linguistics aside – to warrant that.

I kept reminded that most people can’t waltz through school getting straight As without studying or trying very hard, so there must be something special about me. And later I realized that I have written millions of words and done hundreds of videos and most people hadn’t done that either.

Basically, I am in the process of learning to accept that what I have done has some kind of value. Not monetary, of course, but I have learned a lot from doing it.

And VFS is going to teach me how to refine my work into something professional and slick and appealing. I have been refining my own ore for a long time now, and I am a much better writer than I was before I started blogging like this, but I still lack the wherewithal to go back over things to improve them.

Well, in VFS, I won’t have a choice. I highly doubt I will be able to bowl them over with my usual half-assed sloppy work, and I don’t just want to pass the program – I want to impress the fuck out of everybody there. I am aiming for the stars, here, and you don’t get to where I want to go by half-assing everything.

So I will have to shape the fuck up…. I hope.

I will always be grateful to Kwantlen for all it did for me. And I say that knowing that my education there was not exactly of the highest quality. That doesn’t matter now as I am not going to be trying to apply that education to my work anyhow. And I met a lot of cool professors, learned neat stuff, got to sample science courses (Psych), creative writing courses, history courses, a journalism course, a political science course (ick), and of course, my usual diet of philosophy courses.

I am even glad I took Linguistics. I went through hell there, but I survived, and learned to make peace with not automatically being awesome at something. There are certain things this magnificent mental machine of mine just can’t do, and that’s okay. Nobody is good at everything.

And the fact that I stuck with it to the bloody end when I was struggling the whole time through is something of which I am quite proud.

So farewell, Kwantlen Polytechnic University. You might not be the best school around, but you were there when I needed you, and I have grown much stronger since I started with you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Came across this list of science fiction books that changed the genre today.

Like most people, I mainly used it to see how many of them I have already read. Of the 17 there, I’ve read 10. And of the ones I have ready, I totally agree with their assessment. Like I have said before, the novel Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark had such a deep affect on me that I walked around in a profound daze for the next two daze. Something about the ending of that book drew extremely powerful emotions from me when I read it in my late tweens and early twenties, and I am positive it must have changed me a lot as a person.

And come to think of it, I haven’t read it again since. I guess I never wanted to go through all that again.

Stranger In A Strange Land contains such love and liberalism in it that it makes me want to throw the book, full force, at anyone who thinks Heinlein was a conservative. A libertarian, certainly, but back then, all that meant was that you were a ferocious defender of the little guy against the faceless powers that be that would stomp the little guy into the dirt.

Most liberals were, back then, libertarians.

Dune by Frank Herbert is one of my favorite books in all of existence. Every time I read it, I am amazed by how deep, rich, and magnificently satisfying the novel is. Wheels within wheels indeed! And at the center of it all is the spiritual journey of Paul Mua’dib Atreides, who passes through the eye of the needle and comes out the other side without his new power destroying him.

The War Of The Worlds by H. G. Wells still has enormous power. The Time Machine is brilliant but it doesn’t move me like The War Of The Worlds does. TWOTW grips me and makes me feel the desolation of a world shattered by an invasion of an army far stronger than anyone we have. And the fact that we humans survive by sheer dumb luck makes a great deal of sense to me, because the whole idea of the thing is to show us what colonialism is like from the point of view of the colonized.

Foundation by Asimov is an extraordinary novel. When I first read it, and read the description of psychohistory, I had to put the book down just to think about that for a while. I wanted to deny it, but it’s entirely plausible. Humans are unpredictable as individuals but highly predictable in groups, and the bigger the group, the more predictable we become. As if we have some kind of inner balancing system – the zeitgeist, maybe – that insures that it all turns out the same no matter what we do. If force A come into play, force B will spontaneously arise to counter it, and the end result will be about the same as if force A had never gotten into the game in the first place.

It’s spooky, really.

Ringworld by Larry Niven is the weakest entry in the bunch. Niven was so eager to show us around this big idea of his that the plot is, frankly, crap. But I cannot deny that it had a huge impact on the hard science fiction genre, and fired the imaginations of generations of scientists and engineers.

It’s just not my cuppa.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman did not have a huge impact on me personally, even though I enjoyed it. But it doesn’t age well, in my opinion. The big points it was trying to make seem trivial and obvious now. An endless war based on a misunderstanding? Mindblowing. But for its time, it was an amazing work and radical as hell.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a book so profound that it is now taught in non-specialty English classes in high schools and universities all over the world. This pleases me, because it’s an amazing book that treats reinventing the novel like an afterthought. But I have to admit that I worry that, by forcing it on so many kids, it will become resented by an entire generation who might have liked it if they had found it on their own, like I did.

I went through a heavy Vonnegut phase in Grade 9.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury was part of my entree into the world of science fiction. I read all the Asimov my elementary school’s library, and didn’t know what to read next, and there, right next to the Asimov, was Bradbury.

And, last but definitely not least, we have The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It is still the funniest science fiction book I have ever read, even after all these years, and the fact that it unites two of my favorite things – science fiction and comedy – as well as being bloody brilliant means its place in my heart is forever secure.

Reading the list was a lot of fun, but it did bring a sad realization : I guess I am not going to be a famous science fiction writer after all. Not in the usual way, anyhow. I would love to be a writer on a science fiction series, and I could definitely live with being the next Dan Harmon or J. Michael Straczynski.

But I am not going to become the next Asimov. At least, not any time soon. The die is cast, the decision is made, I am going to be a screenwriter or TV writer. So I have to let go of one dream in order to embrace another, and that’s never easy.

If I make a name for myself, maybe those people who approach celebrities and get them to write a book will find me. Or I will find them. And nothing says that I can’t write the great Canadian science fiction novel between gigs.

And who knows…. maybe someone will pay me a million bucks for the movie rights!

And guess who will be writing the script?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.