Finally finished watching a movie that was basically made for me, namely Experimenter, the story of Stanley Milgram and his groundbreaking, controversial, and some might say infamous experiments on our relationship to authority.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the experimenter, click here for a description. I normally would not send you to an outside authority for an explanation of something, but the experiment is somewhat elaborate and I would rather spend my words on analyzing it than explaining it.

The movie was phenomenal. Peter Saarsgard‘s performance as Milgram really makes the film. He speaks in this gentle, soft, deliberate yet penetrating voice that drew me in even more than the subject matter, and I find the subject matter extremely interesting.

That said, I feel like people have made a little too much of Milgram’s findings. They leap to the sensationalist conclusion that the experiments (he did a total of 25, with different methodologies, hoping to disprove himself) mean that we are all nothing but puppets of authority with no will of our own.

People forget that only 65 percent of the people in the studies went “all the way” to the supposedly fatal voltage. That’s around 65 percent more than we’d like it to be, but it’s far too little to make any kind of sweeping generalization as to the depravity of human nature.

We also have to remember that Milgram’s experimental setup put people in a very unusual circumstance. He unknowingly (I assume) created the ideal circumstance for producing that result. The lack of the usual sort of authority, the way the experimenter very blankly insisted the “teacher” continue without hauteur or aggression, the feeling that scientists very legitimately “know better” than the average person…. all of those factors created a scenario that isolated and upset the “teacher” and in those sorts of situations, people do, indeed, fall back on obeying authority.

Especially people of average intelligence who lack the confidence in their own judgment to make the decision to stop.

Plus, it is difficult for people to recognize the urge to obey in themselves when they have been raised in a highly individualistic society which tells them that they are expected to think for themselves, make up their own minds, and fight for what they believe. In such a society, wanting to obey is the ultimate sin, and not the kind of thing one speaks about out loud or even acknowledges within themselves. People who want to leave the decisions up to others are considered loathsome and contemptible, the worst kind of coward.

The only people willing to own up to those sorts of feelings are members of the BDSM community, and even they would have to admit that theirs is a rather extreme expression of that urge. So much so that a person who is quite willing to tell you about their desire to have heavyset women in Nazi uniforms stomp on their genitals will also hasten to add that it is a strictly sexual thing and they are not submissive in real life.

That would be wrong. Someone like that would be considered cowardly, untrustworthy, and vile in the extreme. Just think of how we heap contempt on people (especially men) on people by calling them “toadies” or “lapdogs” or “bitches” of someone else.

I think that is why people react so strongly to the Milgram experiments. They suggest that we are all that kind of person, and for a lot of people, that thought is intolerable.

That’s why people continue to attack his methods and his results to this very day. They want to disprove those results just as much as Milgram himself did. It offends us to our very core to imagine that there are circumstances under which we would act in a way that is so contrary to who we think we are and what we think we believe.

But to me, the disturbing thing is not that the average citizen will commit acts of atrocity under certain circumstances. The truly disturbing thing is that can go all the way up the chain. Not only did the lowly concentration camp guard who put the Zyclon-B into the showerheads at Auschwitz think he was “just doing his job”, so did the guy who told him to do it. And that guy’s boss. And his boss’ boss. And so on the way up to the executive branch, and maybe all the way up to Hitler himself.

In short, nobody thinks it was their fault. The diffusion of responsibility is complete. That was the lesson of Nuremberg. The “I was just doing my job” defense applies equally to everyone with a job. I am sure even hired assassins tell themselves that they were just doing their job (and that someone else would do it if they didn’t) in order to get to sleep at night.

That is why the concept of personal responsibility is so important to modernity. It is the necessary balancing component to individual liberty. Freedom without responsibility is the dream of toddlers and tyrants (but I repeat myself). The justice of a society is measured by how close it gets to perfect alignment of power and responsibility.

And it is easy for us to accept this notion that people should be held accountable for their actions regardless of the influence of authority…. in theory. But when you get into the practical details, it becomes less clear. How reasonable is it to punish the little guy for doing what the big dogs, who have the power to punish noncompliance, tell him to do? Are we really prepared to condemn the actions of others and pretend we are morally superior to them when we know damned well that everybody thinks they would do the right thing in that circumstance…. but only 35 percent of people actually do?

And of course, when it comes to ourselves and what we do to others on a daily basis as part of our work…. whether it’s as big as throwing people out of their homes or as small as driving our delivery van a little too fast in order to make quota…. well, that’s different.

After all…. we’re just doing our jobs.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s my birthday. I turned 43 today.

Can’t say it seems any different than 42. That’s what is nice about being far away from any “special” years. I imagine 45 will feel a little different, and 50 will be a major milestone.

But 43? Meh.

The best thing so far about this day is that my classmates found out about my birthday without me having to figure out how to tell them. You have no idea how much that means to a shy person like me. I got wished a happy birthday a bunch of times, and one student even bought me a pre-wrapped slice of marble cake to mark the occasion.

And I love marble cake, especially when it has extra crunchy marbles.

This morning was Story class, which wound up ending very early because we are in the workshop phase now and one of the two people who was supposed to present today just didn’t show up.

Thanks for lowering the bar, J! Clearly you won’t be very hard to out-compete.

But that left with with a bunch of sudden free time. Class ended around 10:30 am and I didn’t have another class till 1 pm, so I had a lot of time to fill.

The young’ns all took off in search of pancakes, and maybe some day I will be healed up enough (and financially secure enough) to be able to join them when they do things like that. Like, tomorrow night they are going to karaoke somewhere. And I wish I could join them in that too. But I am not there yet.

Soon, though. Maybe. Soon.

Back to sudden free time. At first, I just kind of wandered over to the lounge and sat down, at loose ends. Eventually it occurred to me that the Writing department had lots of computers and I could be getting something useful done on one of those.

And everything went fine at first. ^[1] But then I got the idea in my head that I wanted to hang with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries, and that was the beginning of a very frustrating search for a web based MUSH client that actually works. And I never found one. I even, in my desperation, downloaded a client and tried to install it, even though I knew damned well that public terminals don’t let you install things, for security reasons.

I mean, I know better than to install skeezy stuff from shady websites, but it only takes one idiot to compromise the whole system.

Luckily, one thing I can do from there is load up Facebook in the web browser. ^[2] So not only was I able to catch up some on my Facebook feed, I could use Facebook Chat to chat with dear Felicity, and I really needed that because not being able to connect with my fuzzy friends had left me feeling very lonely.

Thank you so much, Felicity.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, mine has apparently decided that I speak Portuguese. All the Facebook generated text is in Portuguese now, and let me tell you, it is a strange looking language. Like, the window you use to type in a post says “Gostaria de compartihar algo?”, which translates into “I would like to share something?”.

It looks kind of like Spanish, but…. not really. Not at all. In fact, to me, it looks like the result of a Spanish speaking kid trying to make up a magic language.

And I honestly don’t know how it happened. My best guess is that I friended a classmate from Brazil, and Facebook made the switch because apparently Facebook cannot imagine someone being friends with a Portuguese speaker without speaking it.

Thinking I spoke French, I can understand. A lot of web ads seem to assume that because I am in Canada, I must speak French, which is a hell of a leap. So I would not be surprised if my Facebook spontaneously switched into French. And I probably wouldn’t even switch it back. I know enough French to avoid confusion, and it would be a very low effort way to add vocabulary.

Let’s see… oh, the afternoon class was Script Structure, in the dreaded Writing Theatre. So I spend the first hour and a half fighting off sleep, because when you sit literally three feet from the prof’s desk, falling asleep in class is really not an option.

Canned oxygen is beginning to seem like a very attractive option. Or maybe hiding an oxygen tend somewhere on campus, and wandering off for a few deep breaths now and then.

Or I could just get my fucking CPAP machine working again. That would help a lot. Once more, my sleep apnea is going untreated. And eventually that is going to catch up to me. It has already cost me some lung capacity (temporarily I hope). It could be doing all kinds of bad things to my brain and my heart.

And I use those all the time!

Oh, turns out I had the completely wrong idea of what workshopping would be like. I thought we would be breaking down into smaller groups and working together on some intense project. But no, all it involves is doing the assignment then presenting it to the class for comments and suggestions.

That is way, way easier for me. Trying to help others with their stuff is a lot more fun than lectures. Being in the hotseat myself will be less fun, because the whole time, I will be restraining the lunatic voice that wants to scream “How dare you insult my babies! You don’t DESERVE my genius!” at the slightest hint of criticism.

Well, I guess that’s my day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

“Me transformar em uma galinha!” dijo el asistente!^[3]

it’s not easy living in this mind of mine.

For one thing, I have come to realize that I am still going around in a fog most of the time. In my dark and self-sealed solitude in the pre-Kwantlen era, I didn’t notice this fog because my life was criminally undemanding and had a low enough number of variables that I was relatively free of the clinging confusion that comes with my depression.

Or if I wasn’t, it had no major consequences so I paid it little attention.

But when I went to Kwantlen, it became a problem again for a while. Eventually, I made the adjustment and became a lot better (though hardly perfect) at managing to keep track of what I was doing, what I was supposed to be doing, and what I had to do after I finished the current thing.

Especially in the second semester.

Now I have twice the course load, and I am feeling lost in the fog once more. There’s just too many variables for me to keep in my head reliably, and yet I am not yet organized enough to write things down and keep them neat and tidy and organized like a sensible adult would do.

At least I got the adult part of that down. Chronologically speaking.

And the thing is, I am the one who suffers most from my rampant disorganization.

I am the one has to go rooting through all the stuff in my backpack in order to find anything, forcing me to do something I loathe, namely searching for things, on a thrice daily schedule. At least.

I am the one who keeps ending up in situations where I am in a blind panic because I can’t remember if there is homework I should be doing, or worse, should have already done.

I am the one who get caught out on having forgotten something super important and having nobody to blame but myself, and that’s something at which I excel.

And I am the only one who teeters between bovine contentment and terrified confusion as if I was a dog that’s too stupid to understand the connection between barking and getting squirted with cold water.

But I am not that stupid. I know I am the author of my own disasters. And I have loads of incentive to mend my ways and get my proverbial crapulance together. But when it comes to people with depression like myself, incentive doesn’t mean a thing because it meets such heavy resistance from the enormous leaden weight of depression’s anti-action bias that it is smothered before it comes within a country mile of your deadened motivational system.

Hundreds, if not thousands of times in my life, someone has said “You should do this!” or “You have every reason to do that” or even “here are detailed instructions on exactly how to do the other”, and I said “Yup. ” and nothing came of it because it didn’t make me feel motivated at all. Even if I knew it totally should.

There’s just too much weight to shift. It’s like trying to lift a mountain with one arm tied behind your back. You don’t stand a chance. You won’t even move it one iota.

So for me, the struggle to find the motivation to do something has a lot less to do with all the reasons why I should do it and a lot more about the hard, long slog to find my desire to do it and and then, with a great deal of effort, connect it to the motivational center and hope it runs.

That’s life in the starkly post-apocalyptic hellscape of my soul. Takes a lot of scavenging to get anything done, and even then, it might not work.

But things are improving. I think all the effort I have to put into every weekday is forcing my inner glacier to melt faster than ever before. Having class plus homework should be a learning experience for me (so to speak). I am going to have a lot less leisure time (just when it has become leisure time again) and it will be a struggle at first to keep it together under some circumstances.

Take last night. (Please.) (Sorry.) I had everything planned in order to get the Pitch homework (as usual, three loglines and a three minute pitch) done, but then when I got up to do it, I had a straight up pulse pounding freakout level panic attack, and I simply could not get a thing done in that direction before it passed, and it didn’t pass until I slept on it at my usual bedtime.

And seeing as I usually only have 55 minutes to go from waking up to fed and out the door with a freshly made lunch, I couldn’t do it before class in the morning either.

So I had to wing it. That’s not the worst thing in Pitch class. The whole idea is for us to learn to think on our feet and be able to communicate story quickly and well, so a certain amount of improv will be necessary anyhow. And I have fairly good bullshitting skills that I have never developed because I am so compulsively honest.

But something tells me that life in show biz will necessitate their development beyond measure.

I was thinking about this earlier at school. I really, really don’t want to ever be insincere. Insincerity disgusts me. And I have a strong desire to speak the truth as I see it – something which got me into trouble when I was a kid, as one might imagine.

I was such a handful!

But eventually I figured out that the secret was to develop my diplomacy skills, which I initially thought of as “a way to get away with telling the truth” and eventually became my soft social touch.

There are still times when I am too damned blunt, and I look back at those times and think “Guh, STFU! Nobody NEEDs your opinion on this!”.

But now I mostly dance along the edge of the knife as I strive to express myself fully without being insensitive or completely unaware of how I am coming across.

I have such deep reservoirs of charm and wit and likability.

I just need to clear out all the sediment that has built up in the lines in the last 20 years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…inside a bombproof safe inside the belly of a very old whale who will only cough it up if you solve these three riddles…

What I am saying it. I’m a complicated guy, and I get so tired of dealing with myself sometimes.

I am my own impatient parent.

It’s this damned advanced metaconscious mind of mine. Sure, it does a great job of allowing me to monitor my own thought processes for errors and correct them, but those same forces are the ones that rip apart any kind of stability in my find in their relentless hunger for something to distill, separate, and analyze.

And then there’s the hall of mirrors of my self-doubt. I question X, then question my questioning of X, then defend it from a new angle, and so on and so on until the whole chain of thought collapses under its own weight.

Voila! Genius. Or at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Today’s been pretty decent. Got my keys back, praise be to the Steve. Was able to let myself in when I got back from school. I will probably get over the whole incident in a few days.

And that’s great and all. But I wonder why it takes me so much longer to recover from this kind of thing than it took to get freaked out about it. I embrace joy with the same reluctance with which I let go of pain. There is something deeply damaged about my fundamental table of values, and it worries me.

I think it has gotten better over time, though. So possibly it all stems from the deep deep damage I sustained from being sexually assaulted when I was barely old enough to talk. That put me into a state of mind where it was far more important to avoid pain than to seek pleasure. Where the highest value was put on safety, so high that it precluded all but the most stationary and sedentary pursuits.

And the mind prioritizes things via memory. Thus, due to my fucked up mind’s fucked up brain chemistry, pain is remembered with razor sharp vividness and pleasure is treated like anomalous noise and disregarded the moment the pleasure fades.

No wonder we depressives are all a bunch of addicts. We’re trying to self-medicate in ways that always cost way more in the long term than we gain in the short term… but wise investments are only available to those who have enough capital to spare.

Depressives, on the other hand, are always on the verge of starvation.

Let’s see : this morning, I had Short Script. It was our last day of getting to just sit around watching short films and chatting about them after. Next class, we will need to have three pitches for three different short script ideas.

I have too many ideas. When I try to pick one out, they all rush the gate trying to get out, so I have to slam the gate shut or be trampled by the herd.

Art is hard.

And I am doing way too many short paragraphs.

Or am I?

Afternoon class was TV Genre with my favorite prof, Rick Drew. And today’s genre was…. COMEDY! I was so excited it hurt. We didn’t get into as much detail as I wanted, but I had a great time anyhow. Comedy is my THING, man. Like I always say, I am there for skitcom or sitcom.

Then, after class, I had a mentorship (in other words, a half hour chat) with Rick, and he helped me flesh out a vague idea for a sitcom that has been on the back burner of my brain for a week or so. It would be a show about four people living in a rented house. One of them is a bedridden invalid who used to be a big shot business consultant before his illness took his life away. One is a crushingly shy victim of social anxiety, who hasn’t been able to leave the home in sixteen years. The third is a psychosomatic multi-allergy sufferer who nevertheless considers herself to be the only competent one in the house and acts as a kind of ad hoc den mother for the group.

And the fourth lucky resident is the niece of the previous owner of the house, who died suddenly and left it to her. Nobody expected this to happen so soon, and so she knows very little about any of her aunt’s many properties, let alone the people living in them. But she is a very upbeat, can-do kind of person, so she ends her lease, sells off most of her stuff, packs the rest in her adorable chick car, and drives across Canada to live, rent-free, in the house she now owns.

Only to find out that she has to share this house with three housebound people with a firmly established group dynamic and legal protections that make it so you couldn’t evict them with nuclear weapons. And they are not happy to give up their storage room (otherwise known as the fourth bedroom) to some stranger they have never met who just shows up out of the blue with no warning.

Thus, the niece (who burned her bridges getting here) has no choice but to move in and try to make the best of the situation (wait… so THAT’s why they call them situation comedies!). At first, the three are openly hostile to her and she thinks she has been thrown into Hell while still alive, and the situation is very tense.

But of course, as the show progresses, they relax and start to get along, and despite her initial vow to just treat this home as a place to sleep, the niece find herself drawn deeper into deeper into the strange, sad little world of these three people, and the show can explore its real subject matter, which is what happens to people when they are cut off from normal life and are forced to deal with no longer being a part of the world.

Not bad. Needs lots of work. Names would be good. And I need some secondary characters. A social worker, maybe, and a physical therapist/nurse.

You know, I just might be good at this kind of thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Before I begin to tell my tale, I want you to know that everything turns out fine.

But I went through hell earlier because I thought I had lost my keys again. And in a sense I did, it’s just that this time, they were found.

It all happened when I got home from school today. I had the afternoon off today (more on that later), and so I got home around 1:15 pm. And it’s a good thing, too^[1]! Because it was not until I got home and went to use the electronic fob which should have been dangling next to my apartment key on a lanyard around my neck. But they weren’t there.

Immediately, I feel a sensation like someone had thrown a glass of ice cold water into my soul. But I told myself, no need to panic, I probably just forgot to put them on this morning, right? And they will be sitting there on my desk in their usual spot right now!

Um, no. No such luck. And I just couldn’t handle that. So I fucked around on the computer for a while, trying to figure out how the hell I had managed to do it this time when I had been keeping the fucking things on a cord around my neck. ^[2] Eventually, I took advantage of an “eye of the storm” moment in my panic attack, when the anxiety has temporarily worn me out, to get some sleep.

Woke up an hour later, all refreshed and ready for another round of freaking the fuck out, and decided I needed to tell someone about my plight. So I told Joe and Julian, and they were nice enough to look all around my room and the living room for me. But no dice.

So I went back to sleep. For once, my tendency to escape reality via sleep actually served a function. Namely, it kept my panic, depression, shame, confusion, and general reality strain from combining into a roiling miasma of psychological misery centered on my dumbass self.

And when I woke up, I found a note on my keyboard that Steve, the sort of jack of all trades do-it guy for the Writing faculty, has found my keys. My relief was enormous. I will pick them up at school tomorrow and this sad debacle will end and I can get on with my life and whatever I am going to fuck up next.

I try so hard to get my shit together, but I end up messing up anyhow. I blame my weak connection to reality and my environment. A lot of the circuits that should me keeping me organized and together have been hijacked for more internal purposes and I just don’t have enough room left in my consciousness to keep track for all the things I should be keeping track of… like my freaking keys.

Sometimes I feel like I am destined to make every mistake in the world.

Sometimes I feel like the only way I am going to survive is to get enough money to hire a reality assistant who can keep track of things for me so I can concentrate on being brilliant.

Sometimes I feel like being brilliant ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The whole thing has left me feeling kind of shaken up. It’s great that I will not have to pay another $50 for yet another new fob – honestly, at this point, I kind of want to hug Steve. But the fact that shit like this just keeps happening to me has me rattled.

Because subjectively speaking, my reality isn’t very reliable. It’s like things appear and disappear at random. Not literally, of course. But from my working memory. All these deep thought and brilliant mentations of mine can take over all my working memory slots at any point, and I am left trying to deduce the things I have lost track of.

It’s a spooky and very trying way to live.

This morning’s class was Film Theory. We mostly talked about realistic versus formalistic (weird term for it) film-making. Pretty basic stuff. I was very interested in the examination of that scene in Goodfellas where Henry, the main character, pistol whips that motherfucker that got all handsy with his…. cousin, I think?

It was an example of realism, and what an example. Everything about that scene makes it feel real. The deep suburban sound design, the long takes, the humanistic camera angles that make you feel like you are standing right there watching, the incredibly average suburban neighborhood… all to provide contrast to Henry’s act of direct and savage violence. No cool lines, no attempt at intimidation, and no motherfucking sudden ninja powers. Just Henry beating the piece of shit’s face in with the butt of a pistol.

And then, to top it off, the realism of him having to give her the gun and tell her to hide it. And he looks really worried when he does it, too. In an action movie, his sheer cockitude would mean that because he had dominated with a display of violence, the cinematic universe of the move would be too scared to punish him for it.

Instead, despite the fact that he had just done something amazingly badass in a totally badass manner, the next shot, he’s nervous and scared as he hands her the gun.

Shows why Scorcese is one of the Great American Directors.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A student’s life is stressful and in some ways a little humiliating.

Student (relative) poverty is excellent training for future consumers. The feelings of limitation, deprivation, and envy experienced during a four year university degree becomes the wellspring of dissatisfaction that will drive the consumer lust (and therefore, the career ambitions) of products of the middle class at least until they have their mid-life crisis and start wondering what all the fuss was about. By then, they will have completely forgotten what college life was really like, and instead will idolize that time of their lives as a time of no stress and no obligations and good friends and going to the bars or to house parties.

And what happens then? Why, they send their own kids to college, and the cycle begins anew.

But the truth is, it is impossible to get young people to understand how good they have it and how glad they should be not to have the problems of an adult yet. Young people are too busy dealing with the problems of young people to entertain the thought that they should be glad to have problems they can’t even relate to yet.

There is simply no way to transmit your nostalgia to the young. And if there was, you wouldn’t want to, because it would cripple them. When you are older, you are free to think the best times are in the past. But if young people thought that way, they would give up before they even begin. Why bother even trying when the best time to be alive happened before they were even born?

That’s why I distrust nostalgia, perhaps irrationally. But I can’t trust anything that makes people think thing were better than they actually were, and that encourages people to live their life looking backwards instead of embracing the here and now and steering themselves into a future that could be just as good as their imagined golden age if only they would let it.

But no…. they would rather be miserable in the present than let go of their imaginary sunshine paradise of a past that will never return. After all, if they admitted that the future could be as good as the past, then they would have to admit that they have wasted a lot of time revering the past. And after all, their nostalgia has given them so much comfort that it would feel like a betrayal to accept that anything could ever compete with it.

So people ignore the wonders of today, forget all the problems they had way back then or even if they were happy at the time or not, deny their own subjectivity, and go on believing that the time when they were innocent was actually a more innocent time.

Sorry, but no. All evidence points to life on Earth for humans getting better all the time. Maybe you were happier back then, but probably not. Even if you were, that had nothing to do with the nature of the world and everything to do with your ignorance of it.

Right now, in my own student life, I am a little frustrated. The amount of homework I am getting is minimal and none of it involves real writing. I am not sure what I expected of VFS, but it was not this. They keep telling us things will get far tougher later on, and I believe them. I only have to look at the lesson plan to know that.

But right now, it’s too much like Kwantlen. Listening to lectures passively. Doing very basic assignments. Wishing I was doing things. Wondering how much of this bullshit I can tolerate.

This week it will change, at least in theory. We begin workshopping in our workshop groups, and I am excited and nervous. Excited because it sounds like a lot more fun than lectures, and nervous because this will be group work. And not just group work, but creative group work, and I have never experienced anything like that before.

My creativity has always been my own thing. Something where I didn’t have to share, compromise, negotiate, count on others, or win. It was my personal playground, and I liked it that way.

Now I have to let all the other kiddies in my class play, and I will be playing in their playgrounds too, where everything will seem weird and wrong and crazy. I am in no way prepared for this. How could I be? I have been a self-sealed social isolate for such a long time. And like I always say, things grow strange in the dark.

So the next week is probably going to be quite the learning experience. I know I will have the urge to dominate my workshop group, and what the hell, it might even work. I have the skills to lead. I can keep things organized and running smoothly. I can convince people that I am smart and can make them go. And I am reasonably wise.

And honestly, I might be a lot more more comfortable that way. As much as I dislike being superior, in many ways, being in charge suits me. I can run things as I please, and thus use the megalomaniac’s way of coping with the Other : make it more like the Self. I can make sure things are done the “right” way. I don’t have to fight to be heard or struggle for position.

And I know that when I am king, I am a good king. I want everything to go well for everybody, and I want our collective enterprise to succeed. My desire for power is not inherent, but a result of a number of factors that makes me reluctantly accept that I need to stop trying to fight the tide and let myself become a leader.

But who knows. Perhaps my workshop group with have someone with stronger leadership skills than I, and they will be able to organize and coordinate better than I could, and I will be happy that way.

But if I feel like I can do better….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I really don’t.

When I imagine myself as superior to others, I feel this icicle stab of disorientating disconnection in my heart. I don’t want to be above others. That’s like…. the opposite of inclusion, and I desire inclusion so badly it makes me feel crazy sometimes. I want to be a part of things for once, and I know that has a hell of a lot more to do with me and my interpersonal issues than anything else, but still, being superior would take me in the wrong direction.

But maybe I have no choice in the matter. I am (on some levels) superior to others and I should just learn to accept it and deal with it.

I don’t want to be inferior either, of course. I want to be equal. I want to be able to connect with people and catch their vibe and groove on it with them. But if I had to choose… well, I don’t want to be inferior, but it is at least a role I understand. Being the youngest of four kids means you are born inferior and will never catch up, or at least, not until adulthood.

So while the thought of being thought inferior infuriates me, it is at least something I can understand.

Superiority, on the other hand, seems nightmarishly foreign to me. I would feel like I suddenly had a target painted on my make and a bright, hot spotlight shone on me. There is a lot of freedom in being beneath or outside people’s notice. You can more or less do what you please, in whatever manner you please, when you are on the bottom. Having no power means having no responsibility, and no responsibility means total autonomy and freedom from all expectation.

But then again, it also means no self respect, learned helplessness, and utter isolation. So… equality is the right option. Can’t I just…. belong?

Maybe not. Not, at least, without learning to deal with the elephant in the room that is my massive IQ and burden of talents. It has to be possible to be part of things and superior in some ways (and a total doofus in others) at the same time. There has to be some kind of solution.

One solution, I suppose, is to find a place in which you are not superior – where you are a giant amongst giants, so to speak. I was kind of hoping that VFS might be that place, but no, not really. I don’t feel like there are other people there to whom I can relate. The kids are all super talented, I am sure, and in many ways they seem more cut out for like than I ever will be.

But they are not on my level. Dammit.

It’s a hell of a thing, at least if you are as desperate to belong as I am, to realize that there might be no place in the world where you would truly fit in. Where you would have what others have, namely the feeling of easy connection with a group of peers around whom you can totally relax.

My current group of friends does fine by me. I love their company and they seem to enjoy mine. But even with them, there is still part of me that stands apart. Perhaps that is the part of me that is still quite dead inside, I don’t know. Certainly, as my mind has healed itself, I have felt closer to them. I feel closer to everyone. I feel closer to… being real.

But what I am talking about is some place where I fit in and can be useful and valued for more than just being a good friend. Hopefully, I will find that in the entertainment industry. That’s what this whole VFS thing is about.

And then there’s romance. It seems like it is so far away. Closer than it’s ever been, and yet, still a million light years from actually happening. I can’t imagine a scenario in my own life right now where I would end up with a boyfriend or even going on a date. It’s just not in the cards for me right now. There is still far, far too much social anxiety in the way.

And nothing but the vacuum of space in between.

And even if it came my way, I am not sure I could actually do it. Know what I mean? I have a lot of damage and a lot of pain and I worry that I might find it easier to just fake opening up to people and being “real” with them than to do the real thing. I can see myself falling into a pattern of using my people pleasing side to “manage” a boyfriend rather than experience true intimacy. And I would loathe that if I felt it was happening to me. I would hate myself if I felt I was doing it to someone else.

And yet it would be so easy.

I suppose superiority could get in the way as well. To me, the only acceptable relationship model is equality, although that might take different forms with different couples. But the other person might not see it as equal if I am far more intelligent than they are.

That would, in the long run, mean they are not the right person for me. But I know in my heart that I am a brilliant but fragile flower, and that being smarter than someone bears no relation on whether or not you love and care for and, most of all, need them.

I’m a hothouse flower in need of a good gardener, really.

Maybe that’s the workaround for superiority. I don’t know. Maybe the solution is what I said yesterday – accept the responsibility and move on from there. Maybe I just need to grow into my abilities.

I just know that I don’t want to be better than others in any way.

But it’s not like I was given a choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Obviously intelligent, that is. At least, according to some.

And I wonder about that. I can only imagine that it must be some kind of exposed wire high voltage vibe I give off.

I mean, sure, the things I say are pretty intelligent, at least most of the time. But not so intelligent that I would blow people away with my words alone. Then again, for most of my life, saying really intelligent things has only resulted in further alienation.

It’s not anyone’s fault, really. I can say that now. For many years, I blamed myself, while also sort of blaming people for not getting me at the same time. It could be argued that my highly developed verbal skills have their origin in this desperate need to be understood. To get across what I was trying to get across.

But that only takes you so far. The hard truth is that no matter how good my verbal skills get, the gap between me and regular folk (or even between me and my fellow writing students) will always be very wide. I am a very strange breed of cat (fox), and the way I see things is always going to be starkly unique and hard for most people to relate to, at least in one on one situations.

That’s why I have been pondering setting myself up as a sort of guru lately. It would be a way of making my intelligence into a public asset. Go ahead and ask me anything, and I will do my best to give you the right answer. It would go a long way to making myself less threatening to people. Instead of my intelligence seeming strange and frightening to people, it would be something that could benefit them, or at least be benevolent in general.

Because I do think I scare people sometimes. And confuse them. This vibe I give out is strong medicine and the fact that I radiate so strongly on that frequency without being arrogant or aggressive about it just makes my case more baffling to people.

There are expectations for how powerful people are supposed to act. And I don’t conform to them at all. It’s like I am a massive predator of some kind. It doesn’t matter if the sabretooth tiger is completely domesticated and as harmless as any housecat. He’s still going to make a lot of people nervous, especially if like me, he is somewhat clumsy and capable of doing great harm accidentally because of all that size and power and strength.

Holy shit…. I’m Marmaduke.

Perhaps my eternal quest to relate as equals to people was doomed by its own naivete from the very beginning. Perhaps I would be better off simply accepting that, on some levels, I am “above” others, and no amount of effort on my part will convince people that I am not, in fact, a giant, but one of them.

Perhaps I should instead concentrate on being the best giant I can be.

It’s strange to think that it is possible that being less humble and more, for lack of a better word, arrogant might actually make it easier to relate to people. Looking back over my life, I think of all I have done in order to try to avoid “spooking” people so they will not be scared away or weirded out, and it all seems so pointless.

As I have said before. part of the problem is my desire to avoid responsibility. If I truly flex my mental muscles on a social level, I would end up in charge of things. It would be inevitable. Intelligence is a primary leadership quality, and it is only by dint of failing to show other leadership qualities like confidence and competence that I have avoided leadership thus far. If I was to express myself confidently and competently, I would end up winning dominance fights whether I knew I was in them or not, and the fundamental rules of social mammal programming says that he who wins the fight leads.

Whether he wants to or not, really. I imagine that winning the contest but refusing the crown would make people really, really angry. Especially those you have vanquished. They have had their status diminished and are expecting to have a new, strong leader to follow (and in that sense, return their status to them) as compensation, and if such compensation is denied, I imagine that the victor would face the kind of deep primal anger that can only come from someone violating rules that run so deep that we don’t even know they exist.

I think that has happened to me in my life. Being socially clueless, it would have seemed quite random and irrational. After all, if I don’t even know I was in the fight, how can I possibly understand the consequences of winning? Winning what? All I did was share my opinion just like everyone else was doing…. right?

Wrong. So very wrong.

At the very least, I have to grow up and start taking the potential effect of my apparently radiant intellect into account. I’m not a normal person. I am, in fact, a mutant freak. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as I am not trying to pretend to be anything else.

Better to be a believable dragon than an Uncanny Valley person, I suppose.

I have spent a long time hiding from the truth (and the responsibility) of my advanced intellect. I knew I was super smart…. I have known that since I was three years old. But I never owned it. To me, all it meant was that I had no friends and was bored most of the time in school.

But that’s no way to live. Time for me to be a mensch and own up to what I have and try to figure out where the hell I go from there.

There must be some sort of stable state of equilibrium between self-denial and an ego the size of a planet (and the madness that stems from it).

I wish I was smart enough to figure out how to handle being so fucking smart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been quite nice.

For one, I only had class in the morning. And it was Pitch class, which does not take place in the dread Writing Theatre, ergo I didn’t spend the whole time fighting off sleep. so that’s a plus.

Besides, I like the prof. He’s a guy named Kelsey Kirvan, and he’s a pretty funny and laid back dude. He’s like if you took Greg Proops of Whose Line Is it? fame and drained him of all that droopy drippy disdain that normally makes him so intolerable, leaving his Buddy Holly charm and dorky wit intact.

I ended up doing two of my three pitches. They went… well, about how I expected. In my mind, things were fairly clear, but when it came time to spit it out, suddenly it was not so clear. Fair enough. The whole idea of doing three logline pitches a week (plus a three minute pitch… more on that later) is to get practice, and while most people grasp that practice makes perfect, the corollary that this obviously implies, namely that before practice you are far less than perfect, is harder for people to accept.

About that three minute pitch. Apparently, the prof was supposed to tell us to do three logline pitches plus a three minute pitch, and forgot. Then forgot he forgot. So today, around halfway through, he says “We won’t have time for the third round of your logline pitches…” and I am thinking, we have an hour and a half left, what else do we have to do?

Then he tells us we are going to work on our three minute pitches after the break, and this is the first time I have even heard the phrase. Apparently some of my fellow students had heard about it from the other half, group B, but I hadn’t.

And we say “Um, you never told us to do that!”, and the prof says “Did I seriously forget to do that?” and we had to tell him, um, yeah. And so he looked depressed for a few moments then shrugged and said “Well we’re doing it anyway!”

I admire him for that. Many, many, many, MANY times in my life, I have been faced with the consequences of my own absentmindedness and had to just keep going anyhow, so he has my sympathies.

My first logline pitch was for Die Hard, but the second one, I decided to indulge my wacky side and pitched one of the strangest movies in the world, namely Rubber, a movie about a sentient rubber tire with psychic powers that goes on a murderous rampage across the American desert while on the trail of a mysterious woman.

And no… it’s not animated.

In fact, the weirdest thing about the movie is that the tire is not the weirdest thing about the movie. It’s very experimental and arty and post-modern, and yet, it does it in a way that is interesting and charming enough to get away with it. I quite enjoyed it, but then again, I’m weird AF myself, so it suited me.

After class, I had lunch at my fave new lunch spot, Bon Chaz. It’s just such a “me” place! Plus, this time, I noticed that they had a stamp card type thing, like Subway used to have, and so I was all over that. I got one stamp today, and once I have six, I get my seventh sandwich combo for free.

I imagine that will take a while, because alas, I can’t afford to eat there more than once a week or so, but still. Keen gear!

Speaking of which, I have been thinking about trying to find a little part time work again lately, just for pocket money. Going downtown every day has rekindled the feeling of desperate deprivation that I used to feel when I was on regular welfare and so much of the world was cut off to me. I have it a lot better now, but I suppose my ambition level (and stress level) has made me want to be able to afford to do like my fellow students do and go out for pizza by the slice or whatever for lunch. And indulge myself in other ways.

I wonder if I could get work as an extra or a clapboard holder or something else at the bottom rung of the entertainment industry. I am not looking for a lot of work, because frankly I don’t have the time. But something that was like, four to eight hours a week would be groovy.

Either that, or I need to finally get around to land myself a sugar daddy who thinks I am brilliant and wants to do everything he can to make sure my talents get to shine.

It could happen. I’m cute.

It was nice commuting home when it was not rush hour. Way less stressful. I was still hyper vigilant about making sure I got a seat on the Skytrain, because by now it’s compulsive, but otherwise it was a far more relaxed trip home without the usual crowding and atmosphere of stress and tension.

Rush hour always has a tense vibe. Kind of like a milder version of the harsh airport vibe. And I am very sensitive to the local vibe. It’s why I hate laundromats. They are so full of stultifying boredom!

When I got home, I did my best to catch up on sleep. So I slept for most of the afternoon. And it’s funny to think about it now, but it used to be that I viewed sleeping all afternoon as a failure, like I was wasting my life away in sleep.

Now it feels like a victory. After all, I only get around five hours of sleep a night. If it wasn’t for napping, I would probably lose my tiny grip on reality.

And then the pork witch would gabble garble in the Frankenstein whirligig all day!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Getting better at the school thing.

The Writing Theatre classroom is still my bête noire. It makes me super sleepy every damned time. I am really worried that my teachers think I find them incredibly boring, or that I just don’t have my shit together, or whatever. I do a lot of yawning in that damned room. Too much for them to think it’s sarcasm, I suppose. But still, I worry.

More importantly, it means I spend the whole time stressed and miserable. I can’t concentrate, let alone appreciate the content of the course. I want to be alert and focused, not fighting sleep the whole time and getting super stressed out.

I assume it has to do with the fact that it’s a room with poor ventilation and a lot of people breathing in it. There was a classroom at UPEI that had the same effect on me. Every class I had there, I spent the whole time fighting to stay awake. It had no windows (being in the basement) and yet it had seating for thirty students, plus the prof.

I hate rooms like that. I take ventilation very, very seriously.

And I don’t know what I can do about it, to be honest. I crack the window near me every chance I can get, and that helps (which supports my ventilation theory). I would open it up further, but it’s a window that will not stay open on its own and all I have to prop it open is a whiteboard eraser.

I will have to rack my brains in order to think of something bigger I can bring and/or find to open it more. I need air, dammit. My sleep apnea gives me oxygen issues even under the best of conditions. Sitting in a dark closed box (did I mention that the place has thick black curtains to keep the light out?) is not compatible with my health, let alone my staying awake.

I wonder if any of my fellow students have the same problem. It doesn’t seem like they would, because they are all young and thin and healthy. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t bugging people. Perhaps I will complain to the higher ups and see what happens.

At the very least, I might get official permission to open the windows wide when I come in, and someone may know how to get them to stay that way.

This morning’s class was Script Structure, taught by Brian (guess where?). It wasn’t bad. If I had been alert during it, I probably would have enjoyed it more. The homework for next week is to read the script for The Crying Game and do the Seven Pillars thing with it.

I’ve never seen the movie, so I am looking forward to reading it.

I only know the song :

I was pondering my own particular flavour of gender dysphoria today. It was seeing a nanny comforting a crying child that set me off. I really envy that nanny. I want to be in her position…. caring, nurturing, comforting… without any worries that someone will think they are a pervert or be scared by them or otherwise judge them as doing wrong by their gender.

Like I have said before, I have never felt like I was in the wrong gendered body. But there have been times I wished I was a woman not because that would be the “right fit” but because I feel like they can express what I want to express and play the role I want to play.

Women don’t realize how lucky they are to have being supported by a man as an option. I would love to be a housewife, with some little ones to take care of. I would be an amazing mother. Granted, seeing as I am a gay man in his forties, the little ones would probably be cats, not babies, but still. I have a strong desire to care for and be there for little critters of one sort or another.

I have so much love to give.

My therapist pointed out that I don’t need to be a woman to do all those things. And he’s probably right. Perhaps if I was more active in the gay community (hard to imagine being less active), I would meet other maternal men who could act as role models for me and show me how to be all that I want to be without having to go to the extreme.

That seems like the ideal outcome. I am happy being male in body and biology. I love my penis. So I would hate to have to leave my maleness behind in order to express my femaleness. Either way, I would be denying half of myself.

Right now, all I have in the way of gender identity is “somewhere in between”. Part of me says “Why do you need a gender identity at all? Just be you!”, which is noble and quite in keeping with Western individualism, but it’s not that easy. People need to know who they are.

Some of us don’t even know what we are.

The afternoon class was Character. We had a brief terminology quiz at the beginning of class. As usual, I had totally forgotten this was going to happen, but everyone was studying for it in the lounge during lunch and quizzing each other on it out loud, so I ended up studying by osmosis.

We’re learning the Hero’s Journey now, and I have to say that it doesn’t seem nearly as impressive now as it did when I was watching Bill Moyers interview Joeseph Campbell about it on PBS back in the 80’s. Perhaps that’s because back then, it was being presented at a fascinating set of insights into the universal human story and not as something I am supposed to be applying to real world writing.

A lot of it seems like hooey to me now, or at least, not as big a deal as it once seemed.

But I will learn it, partly because it’s interesting, but mostly because apparently, according to my profs, the Seven Pillars and the Twelve Steps of the Hero’s Journey (the first one is admitting you have a problem) are used as the common lingo of writing for entertainment, so I had better know WTF people are talking about.

Anyhow, that’s my day, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.