A friend of mine, a single mother with a long history of depression and an autistic child, just had someone break into her place and steal all her stuff, including the kid’s favorite toys.

Actually, it happened a couple of days ago, but it’s taken me some time to calm down enough to write about it. The first time I saw it on my Facebook feed, all I could do is stare at it then blindly resume my business because I just couldn’t even. I din’t want to believe it was true. I guess I mentally filed it under “ignore and maybe it will go away” file in my head. To Be Processed Later.

But nope. It happened. And I am beyond angry. I wish I could reach out and crush the motherfucker that did this. I want to beat him or her until they cry like a baby and shit themselves. I want to bash them on the cranium with something jagged. I want to make them pay.

That’s the thing about my liberalism. I have never pretended I was somehow immune to the desire for bloody justice. I am a very passionate guy and when something like this happens, I want the person who did it to burn. Sorry if that makes me seem unevolved to some, but it’s who I am. I am an intensely protective person, and when something like this happens, I lose my freaking mind.

That’s why I had to wait a few days before I was calm enough to write about it.

And there isn’t a single thing I can do about it. She lives far away. Even if she didn’t, it’s not like I am a cop or any other kind of trained investigator. I wouldn’t know how to find the person or persons responsible for this unthinkable crime. And even if I did find them, I don’t want to go to jail for what I would do to them when I did.

I am not saying I would kill them. I wouldn’t. Unless they couldn’t or wouldn’t return the stuff. Then all bets are off.

And because there is nothing I can do about it, I am left feeling impotent and frustrated and helpless. Somehow, no matter how we might tell ourselves that being a good person does not keep bad things from happening to you and that in the grand scheme of things, “deserve don’t mean shit”, injustice of that sort enrages us. Or me at least. We cannot help but think that bad things should not happen to good people, and when they do, we have no choice but to shake our fists at the sky and demand justice.

Back here on Planet Sanity, I had a good day at school. Morning class consisted of watching six episodes of Bob’s Burgers in order to prepare us for the possibility of doing our spec script for it. Not exactly torture – I love the show – but there is a reason I can’t even imagine binge-watching a show : I get sick of things very quickly no matter how much I love them.

In fact, today I overheard some of my fellow students talking about how when they find a song they like, they listen to it over and over again until they are sick of it. And I am thinking, how can people’s DO that? I have to limit myself to listening to a recently acquired beloved song only once a day in order to keep from burning out on it.

Like this song I acquired recently :

Love, love, love that song for reasons I have decided not to investigate. And part of me wants to listen to it over and over again. But I know better. If I did that, I would get sick of the song, and then, to my way of thinking, I would have “ruined” it for myself. If I restrain myself, it will turn into just another song in my collection, and then it will be there for me indefinitely, to be enjoyed many times over the years.

Spent lunchtime in the writing student’s lounge, which is good. The only cure for phobia is exposure, after all, and the more I hang with my fellow students, the more I will be able to lower my guard around them and, god willing, may even be able to let a few of them in. Maybe even make new friends.

I have never known how to make friends. Every friend I have ever had was acquired by sheer dumb luck and the efforts of others. Or at least, that’s how it seems. I didn’t so much make a friend as fail to reject some. The number of people with whom I am truly compatible is depressingly low.

Today was oddly busy for me, actually. In addition to class, I had to do a short interview for a VFS video (they do this for all students), then at 4:10 pm I had my “getting to know the new students” meeting with the head of the writing department, Michael Baser, which was depressingly brief and hurried. I am going to have to take him up on his “open door to students” policy some time because this is a man who wrote for Norman Lear all through the seventies and, well, Normal Lear basically owns a chunk of my childhood because of the shows he made, and I am dying to know what it was like to write for him.

We comedy nerds get stars in our eyes for people like that!

And then I had a “mentorship” with Rick Drew, my fave prof so far, and we shot the breeze for a while. He told me that he thought I was a very deep and intelligent^[1] person, and that he was proud both of and for me for doing what I am doing in coming to school at my age, and that felt super good.

As a result, any other profs I meet have some pretty stiff competition if they wanna be my favorite!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got home from school and I’m going straight into writing. This feels good. This feels…. right.

This morning was, bizarrely enough, Film Theory again. Yup, the same class that I had in the afternoon on Friday. So technically, I had it twice in a row. Strange.

But I am loving the class, so I am not going to complain. Film clips and analysis – I am so there. And today we sort-of-snuck into the Main Theatre, which has a way, way bigger screen. Not as big as a real movie theater’s screen, of course, but definitely big enough to give you the movie theatre feel because there are far fewer seats and you are much closer to the screen.

Man I loved it. Movies are a whole new experience there. We watched the whole “Luke, I am your father!” bit from Empire Strikes Back and it was so good it was practically a religious experience. I want to watch every movie there from now on. I am seriously thinking of sneaking in during lunch tomorrow and eating my lunch there with like, The Lion King playing.

We watched the ending of the Lion King too. For me that was a religious experience. It’s my favorite movie of all time and to see it like that filled me with profound emotion. I pity the sort of people who can’t enjoy the magnificence and spiritual beauty of The Lion King because it’s “just a cartoon” and “cartoons are for kids”.

I have received genuine spiritual healing from that movie. It’s that good.

Sometimes, this song makes me feel almost normal and acceptable and part of life, as opposed to the being a dead frostbitten gangrenous toe on the body public.

God I am hard on myself. But it’s the truth of how I feel. I am slowly getting over it.

I am warming up inside. Thawing out. Spring comes very, very slowly to this heart of mine, but every bit of thawing is a victory over the long dark winter of my depression.

In the afternoon, we had Story with Rodger (not Roger, as previously reported), and once more I found it very hard to stay awake. That’s no surprise, though, because I had one of my thankfully rare bouts of total insomnia last night and as a result I have seriously not slept a wink in the last 24 hours.

Tried to get to sleep at a nice decent (though still somewhat insane) 2 am, and got nowhere. The sleeping pills had zero effect. So eventually I just got up and played Hex for a while, then had breakfast and headed off to school.

As is the norm when this happens, it’s like my brain is frozen in a block of ice and while this is not at all painful (I feel great, actually), I will not be able to sleep until it melts, and at that point, I presume, I will sleep the sleep of the ancients.

Better make sure I eat first. Don’t need to have a blood sugar crash in my sleep. That never ends well. Nothing like waking up feeling like you are dying and can’t remember what that means.

Anyhow, the Writing Theatre where we have like half our classes seems to make me sleepy. I am guessing it doesn’t have the greatest ventilation. This theory is borne out by the fact that I found it way, way easier after I took the initiative (yay me!) and opened the window, and slipped a blackboard eraser in there to keep it open a couple of inches.

But that’s not the only factor at play. That pleasant baritone of the prof’s seems to have a soothing effect on me that makes me want to curl up for naptime. You barely have to glance at the rock to see all the daddy issues hiding under it on that one.

Truth be told, I had a distinct lack of supportive, competent, protective male voices in my early life. Couple that with my sweet but somewhat chilly mother and old-school pre-DSM-IV psychiatrists would be nodding knowingly before laying a finger aside their noses and saying “Inadequate father figure, remote and distant mother…. no wonder he’s gay!”.

Of course, those same schmucks (in my head, they are all Jewish, and I refuse to apologize for that) who said homosexuality came from a mother being too close to her boy. And the stereotype of the gay mama’s boy seems to indicate there is at least a sliver of truth to that idea.

Heck, I would have been a total mama’s boy if my mother had wanted anything of me. Or wanted me.

One little oopsy daisy today : ended up forgetting both tablet and headphones in the Bear Pit, aka Theatre 2, aka the place where I have Film Theory class. I had to pick them up after class. And for a while, I was beating myself up for being such a basket case, as per usual, but once I recovered the items, I was able to make some peace with it.

The truth is, that’s life for me. I do my best, but I will always be the wacky wizard whose amazing abilities are belied by the fact that he’s a total spaz and criminally absentminded. I will probably never be the smoothly organized and altogether together dude I want to be. I will always be this way, this is who I am, and I am just going to have to learn to accept that.

You take the bad with the good. I’m a complex person full of contradictions. It’s kind of a hobby.

I can only hope to attract those who find my spazziness and confusion endearing, and it makes them want to help and protect me like the dizzy toddler I am. At least until I can afford to hire an assistant to handle all that stuff and hopefully keep me from looking like an idiot.

I’m not an idiot. I’m a genius. Billions of people would love to have my abilities.

I’m a genius.

We tend to be a tad overspecialized.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel pretty good today.

I have been processing a lot of stuff lately due to school. So much new input, and way more physical input than my depressed self ever got. There is less moving about than at Kwantlen, seeing as most classes are on the writing floor of 198 West Hastings, but the stakes, as well as the mental intensity, is way higher.

And I know that this, right now, is the grace period. I only have a little bit of homework, and it’s fairly easy stuff. The hardest thing so far has been to read the script for Misery. It is ironic that this is the first script of many that I will have to read as part of my studies turns out to be one of the few I have actively avoided ever since my mother told me what happens in the book.

Avoided the book, avoided the movie, ended up having to read the script in my first week of film school. Whatever.

Actually, I found, to my delight, that I quite liked reading the script. It was such a high density way to absorb a movie. It’s just like watching the movie except you can experience minutes of the movie in a matter of seconds. After all, the screenplay format is designed to tightly adhere to the “one page of script is one minute of movie” rule, and it takes way less than a minute to read a page, especially if you are as fast a reader as I am.

So I found myself doing the online equivalent of eagerly turning every page with breathless anticipation. Of course, that’s probably not going to be true of every script I read – the one for a Misery was written by William Fucking Goldman, the guy who wrote both the book and the screenplay for The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies of all time, amongst many other things. Goldman is considered, and not just by me, one of the best screenwriters and script doctors of all time,

So in a sense, by starting us off with Misery, the prof is starting us off with the best as a way of easing us into script reading and analysis. Reading that script was not only highly pleasurable, but sparked my appreciation for what makes a screenplay truly excellent.

I hope I can write that well some day. So much packed into every word!

As for the story : I can’t help but feel sorry for poor Annie Wilkes. She’s clearly a deeply broken person. A monster, to be sure, for what she does to poor Paul Sheldon, the writer, but not an entirely unsympathetic one. The scene with the scrapbook suggests that she has killed people all over the USA, but that seems like an informed attribute to me. Nothing else about her suggests she has the sort of issues that would lead her to be a serial killer. She’s certainly no coldblooded psychopath or psychotic driven to repeat the same scenario over and over again, and nothing we see suggests she is sadistic.

I’d diagnose her as having borderline personality disorder. And that can lead to violence (in fact, it usually does) but not to the point of being a serial killer. Maybe the studio (or Stephen King, for all I know) felt she wasn’t villainous enough to deserve her very violent end just for what she did to Paul. She had to be a true monster in order to deserve her sticky end because, if she’s a a serial killer, then our hero Paul is not just freeing himself, he’s preventing who know how many future murders.

People like their moral lines drawn with a very thick pencil sometimes. Myself included.

Now that I have read the script, I have to write a brief thing where I say where the seven pillars of storytelling – Setup, Inciting Incident, First Act Turn, Midpoint, Second Act Turn/All Is Lost, Climax, and Resolution – are in the script, with page numbers to prove I have read the thing (and not just seen the movie), and a few sentences justifying my choice.

No problem. Setup is the stuff leading up to the accident where we see Paul’s process and establish that this is his last Misery book. Inciting Incident is the accident, duh. The First Act Turn occurs when Paul wakes up and discovers his new predicament. The Midpoint would be where Paul realizes he’s basically being held hostage. That sets up the rising tension leading to the Second Act Turn, which occurs when Annie reveals that she knows all about Paul’s moving around before and how she never called anyone about him. The Climax is, of course, when he brains her with his typewriter, and the Resolution is the “18 months later” bit at the end where we see that Paul is doing fine now.

And after the harrowing events of the movie, I really, really needed that. If the movie had ended when the cops came in, it would have pissed me off. I needed to see that Paul was fine on all levels after his experience with Annie. Walking, happy, not in an asylum.

I look forward to reading more scripts. It might even become a habit. I could “watch” a lot of movies that way. I wouldn’t get the full experience, of course, but it could help me catch up.

I ordered in Chinese food for supper last night, which is probably part of why I feel good today. I have come to the realization that I have a strong reason to improve my diet now : so I can be more focused and alert in class. I spent a lot of my class time last week barely able to stay awake and feeling very spaced out and hazy. I would much rather feel like I feel right now.

So I need to improve my diet to Chinese Food levels. Lots of meat and vegetables. Give my body everything it needs to run well.

It could make life a hell of a lot easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If I could send a message back in time, I would send it to my 16 year old self, and I would tell him (me) to man up, stop being such a goddamned pussy, and go into finance.

Maybe that’s just the cynicism of age talking, but that’s how I feel right now. I wish I had said “fuck all this artsy shit, I am gonna go where the money is. ”

I was totally on track for it coming out of high school. I got such high marks in accounting that the teacher was a little afraid of me. Said it would be a sin if I didn’t go into accounting as a profession. And I said “Uh, sure. ”

And that’s as far as it went. I knew I didn’t really want to be an accountant. Maybe if it had been harder for me, I would have valued it more, I don’t know. But to me, it was absurdly easy. It was all just math and being careful to do things right. It was just a system to me, and a relatively primitive one at that due to the limitations of the math inherent in finance.

And I am very good at systems.

But still, I knew I did not want to be an accountant, and that was proven beyond a doubt when I went to college and somehow ended up registering for a lot of courses that had nothing to do with business or accounting and no courses that did.

I never even considered business or finance. Somehow, the idea that accounting could be used for more than becoming an accountant never occurred to me. I never thought of becoming an entrepreneur, a banker, a broker, or any of the dozens of other jobs that the accounting skillset suits to a T.

To be honest, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I tried to get some idea by going to the guidance counselor’s office to take aptitude testing. But they didn’t seem to want to do it. I went like four times, and each time, they ignored me for a while then told me they couldn’t do it for some bullshit reason or another.

God those people were useless. And bitter. They always seemed pissed off, like a couple on the verge of divorce.

It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. If getting 98 percent in Accounting wasn’t enough to convince me to follow that particular star, no aptitude test stood a chance. I had already decided, on some level, that being good at something didn’t mean you had to do it, despite what all the guidance counseling I had up until that point had told me.

The idea that you could be very good at something without enjoying it was not part of the curriculum when I was in junior high. And it honestly does seem counterintuitive to me, even now. I suppose that’s the problem with not being a mastery oriented person.

I just didn’t get enough pleasure from doing it right to even seriously consider doing it after graduation.

I wonder about other timelines for me sometimes. Versions of myself that might have happened. I know that if I had somehow gained some focus and ambition back then, I could have nailed a business degree, no problem. And then maybe gone on to get an MBA.

And then I would have either gone into finance or started a business.

Pretty sure I could have made a small business work. But knowing me, and how I always want to take things to the next level, I probably would have started a franchise. Then sold the franchise rights to others and helped them get their version of my brilliant business up and running.

And then… WORLD DOMINATION! Mua ha ha!

Well, maybe not. But remember, my heroes list includes Hershey, Disney, and Jobs. Those guys changed the world more than your average guru, and they did it with business, not peace love and granola.

I can’t see anything but spiritual annihilation down the finance path. I mean, I suppose I could have become a nice safe (and rich) banker or worked in honest insurance, but I know how greedy I am, and I can’t see anything good coming from my being in a position where there’s oodles of cash to be had and all I have to do is forget my basic honesty, fall in love with my own cleverness on an unprecedented scale, decide that anything is fair game as long as I can get away with it, and completely sell my soul to Satan.

I can imagine that version of myself ending up angry, arrogant and bitter. A classic case of “I have it all, so why aren’t I happy?”. That’s the price for pursuing the ideals of greed and materialism, I suppose. You spend your youth pursuing every dollar you can trick into the back of your windowless van, only to find out that, once age slows you down enough for you to stop and think about what you are doing, and ask yourself if you’re truly happy, or just busy.

I honestly think that the pursuit of wealth and status acts as a religion in some people. More than you would think. By encouraging us to never settle for less than we can get and always seek to better our position, society gives people the structure they need in order to keep going. Whenever the modern citizen starts wondering what they are doing with their lives, received ambition says “You’re working hard to get that promotion!” every single time.

But that only lasts for a while. So people learn to just stay absorbed in their day to day lives and never look up at the sky.

And it works for people, because what other purpose in life does the modern spiritual milieu offer? The world has a catastrophic shortage of meaning and nurturing.

What’s a soul supposed to do?

I will talk to you you nice people again tomorrow.

If I didn’t care any more, I would improvise my life. No planning, no cogitation, no forethought, just do whatever seems like a good idea at the time and whatever happens, happens. No more trying to figure out where the road goes before I set foot on it. No more always trying to make the “smart” decision and raking myself over the coals when I make a suboptimal decision. No more laboring in futility to control my life and what happens to me via the power of my mighty mind alone. No more feeling responsible for everything. No more constant second-guessing myself.

If I didn’t care any more, I act on almost every impulse. I would follow my heart and see where it leads me. Goodness knows, my brain has been in charge for far too long considering its shameful track record. Time to give the heart a try. Other people seem to get by with a far more heartfelt and far less cerebral existence. They seem to flourish, in fact, and they don’t seem to need this layer of total vacuum between themselves and reality in order to function. I am willing to accept the idea that my entire approach to life is fundamentally broken. It would explain a lot.

If I didn’t care any more, I would laugh as loud as I want whenever I felt like it. I would cry openly during movies, offer sincere and sensitive help to people who seem down or sad, and hug people all the time. I would completely abandon modulating the volume of my personality, as well as any shame I feel about my largeness on any level. I didn’t ask to be large. I just am. And sometimes I think I would be better off if I was around people who could handle that.

If I didn’t care any more, I would be brutally blunt most of the time. Whatever I observed (or deduced or whatever) I would report, and I would welcome the world to do the same to me. If I did restrain myself, it would be on a case by case basis, not because of some deeply cowardly inner inhibition against drawing attention to myself or needing to treat the world like it’s made of fine porcelain and all the people are made of wet tissue paper, just like me. Sometimes I would be a source of truth, not comfort, and I would accept that as part of my role in the world.

If I didn’t care any more, I would assert myself in the world on an epic scale. I would learn the art of getting what I want and getting things my way, and heaven help whoever or whatever got in my way. Fuck justification. I would get what I wanted because I wanted it. No other justification is needed. And I would devote all of my considerable mental resources to this pursuit. Everyone else does, why not me? It’s not my fault I’m a giant.

If I didn’t care any more, I would cease all efforts to be understood by average people, and I would no longer give a damn if my intelligence spooks people or makes them think I am weird. I am weird, dammit, and there is little point in hiding it. I would be as smart as I wanted to be at all times, without restraint. I would radiate like a star on all frequencies and the people who got close to me would be the people who could stand the heat. I would stop feeling like a failure to communicate is always my fault.

If I didn’t care any more, I would choose to be tough instead of cautious. I would drag myself into and through difficult situations and constantly challenge myself to get the fuck over it. I would develop a thick hide and powerful mental muscles, and I would step out of my own shadow into the sun without shame, fear, or hesitation. I would take life head-on every single time because I would know I can take it. I would dare life to throw obstacles at me, then chew them up and shit them out. My attitude would be, “Come at me, bro!”.

If I didn’t care any more, I would charm the world. I would leave the line between “influence” and “manipulate” up to the scholars and simply engage the world through my mind, heart, personality, and powers of persuasion to their full effect. I would have a massive presence, and because I don’t worry about attracting attention any more, I would love every ever-lovin’ minute of it. I would be the sort of person who can fill a room just by smiling, and who takes it for granted that people are going to like him. Because why wouldn’t they?

If I didn’t care any more, I would be as generous, magnanimous, benevolent, and protective as I wanted to be, without sweating the little details of life. I would care without fear, love hard and deep, be positive and optimistic in a contagious way, stand up for people who can’t do it for themselves, and do whatever I think is right no matter what. I would interpose myself betwixt the shoals of humanity and the cold and senseless hand of fate, and work like hell to make the world a saner, safer, softer, and more secure place than ever before.

And finally, if I didn’t care any more, I would enjoy life as if my life depended on it, because on a psychological and/or spiritual level, it does. I would eat my fill of life like it’s a mad buffet and stuff myself with all things good in life rather than be one of those poor fools starving in Eden. I would grab life by the ass and pull it close to me, then slow-grind on it all night long. I would get drunk on the mild of human kindness, and give myself away for free any chance I got.

Yup, life would be very different if I didn’t care any more.

But I do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I realized today that I send rather spectacularly mixed messages in my social interaction. And I am positive I am not alone in that.

On the surface, I am friendly, pleasant, and occasionally funny. This is the version of myself that I consider to be “me”, for both good and bad reasons.

But I also have deep seated social anxiety, so while my facial expressions say “Friendly funny guy”, my body language is busy signaling “go away and leave me alone now!”. It’s the anxiety speaking, and it wants the tension/awkwardness of the social interaction to end ASAP, and to hell with any consequences.

And people listen to the body language and go away. They don’t know that is what they are doing, of course. But I am sure some people think I am a nice guy but kind of standoffish, and that is not what I want to be like at all.

So now, I want to figure out how to disarm this particular psychological trap. I know the elements of body language. It’s how I know mine is bad. So the direction to go in my pursuit of a friendlier overall image as someone who might actually want to be included in things sometimes.

It won’t be easy. There’s a deep part of me that does want people to just go the fuck away and leave me alone so I can slither back into my shell like an exhibitionist snail. Tangling with that will take a lot more than merely consciously modifying my body language to be more open and relaxed.

That is bound to come across as inauthentic unless I can deal with the underlying issues that make me so damned scared in the first place.

And I am working on it. I tell myself I have nothing to be ashamed of and that I have as much right to be in the warmth of the world of human interaction as anyone else. And slowly, slowly, it penetrates all that ice around my heart and makes me a little more human.

And a little more whole.

Overall, my attitude about all this change in my life is that I am not going to resist it at all. I will deliberately open up my whole being to being shaped by my new environment and let myself become whatever I need to become in order to adapt to my new surroundings.

The core of who I am won’t change much, but my surface coloration will change freely.

Tries Final Draft, the industry-standard screenwriting program. Holy shit, is it cool. It makes writing in screenplay format so easy that I really wanted to take it home with me so I can keep using it. Sadly, it costs a lot of money. Even with the VFS student discount of 50 percent, it would be at least $150.

Maybe some nice person will buy it for me for my birthday, which is two weeks from today. It would be one heck of a gift, because once you own a copy, you own it for life and that means free support, maintenance, and updates for the rest of my life.

A little worried by my increasing lack of sleep. I am running on 4 to 5 hours of sleep per night and that clearly can’t last. I will try to catch up over the weekend. Just like everyone else who is part of the 9 to 5 world, I suppose.

It should really be like…. noon to 8.

Today’s morning class was Format, which is all about official Hollywood screenplay format. Exciting, no? At first I was freaking out while the very energetic professor reeled off all this stuff about margins and fonts and so forth, but then she said Final Draft takes care of that for you, and I was like, phew.

Things like that, where I would have to know and apply. many rules simultaneously, make my brain melt into goo. Hence my low score in Linguistics.

What we ended up doing was very cool. In order to get us into using Final Draft and also to get us thinking like screenwriters, what we did was start doing our own adaptation of the novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammond into a screenplay. We were given the first few pages of the book, and we started the adaptation in class, then we’re to finish on our own before next class.

And it’s surprisingly fun to do. It’s an act of translation of a rather neato variety, and I would be working on it right now if I had Final Draft at home.

In the afternoon, it was Character with Roger, the same dude who taught us Story yesterday. It was basically more of the same. A lot of it is stuff I already know from my own observations, but it is nice to have the validation. I enjoy other, more focused courses more. But perhaps things will become clearer once we exit the theory part of writing and get into the workshopping.

Yup, there’s a heck of a lot of group work in my future. That’s how the biz works, especially in TV, and so whatever social issues I have remaining are just going to have to fuck directly off because they are in the way of my dream, and that means they gotta go. It’s going to be trial by fire in that sense. And I have a lot of emotional junk to burn.

Starting to get an idea of what I want to do for one of my feature length scripts. Was a little disappointed to find that we are not allowed to have supernatural or science fictional elements in our low budget films. I can totally write science fiction that requires no special effects at all.

Oh well. Guess I will have to write a deep exploration of the human condition that is both funny and extremely sensitive, making people feel better about life by putting a deeply humanistic message in an easy to digest comedy format.

I hate it when I have to do that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Your read that right. TEN. Two classes a day, five days a week, no repeats.

It’s a little intimidating, but for the most part, I am excited by it. This is the kind of challenge I was hoping for. Bring it on! I want to work goddamn it. My only concern is that I will end up with so much homework that I will just plain not have the energy to blog, or at least, not to wordcount.

So in the future, this blog might just get a tad more stream of consciousness. Just a retelling of the day in whatever order it occurs to me. Whee!

Speaking of which : This morning’s class was Pitch 1. No, we’re not talking about ball throwing and we’re not working with molten tar, it was of course about how to pitch your stories to people who might actually want to buy them, or even hire me to write more of it and then hang around to make changes.

I get all tingly thinking about it.

And it was a fun, relaxed, friendly kinda class. There was just the ten or so of us, and we were in a circle around some tables, and that always makes things more relaxed for both instructor and student. The whole lecture thing is very hierarchical. Look at me and shut up, I’m the important person with the knowledge!

And the prof was great. Very funny, fun, and has loads of experience in the biz, mostly film. It was a little cozy in Classroom Two, but not enough to bother me. He talked about the importance of learning to pitch and how the most important thing was to get your idea across succinctly and compellingly, not to wow them with your charm or personality.

The standard pitch consists of the name of the property, the genre, and the logline. The logline is a one sentence sales pitch for what you’ve got, and he taught us one formula for a good logline : A description of the protagonist, quick summary of what happens in the flick, then something about it that makes it different from other properties.

That last part is the one I have trouble with. My brain doesn’t work like that. BZZT BZZT ERROR.

For next week we are supposed to have three pitch packages for movies we love. And obviously, the title and genre part of that are easy. And describing the protagonist is not hard for me, nor is summarizing the general thrust of the plot. But that last thing….

Here’s what I have for The Lion King :

It’s called The Lion King, it’s an animated feature film, and it’s about a lion named Simba who must abandon his carefree lifestyle in order to avenge his father’s death and bring life back to the Pridelands in this classic Disney animated feature.

See what I mean? All I did in the final part was restate the genre! I can’t imagine what makes The Lion King unique, or what I think is the coolest part. To me, it’s unique because it’s very good. That’s it.

I suppose I could say “with a deep spiritual messages about hope, family, and renewal”, but that doesn’t seem quite right. I get the feeling I am going to have to be willing to bullshit a lot if I am going to make it in the biz. Say things I know aren’t true, mislead people, that kind of thing.

Honestly, I don’t know if I can do it. I that I will likely just get real good at spinning the truth without actually lying in order to get by. And, of course, charm.

In the afternoon we had Story with Roger. It was a rather rambling but enjoyable lecture. Roger has a lovely rich baritone speaking voice, and has a lot of teach us, as well as, of course, lots of great anecdotes from the point of view of a showbiz insider.

I assume that the course will be a little more structured from this point on. I enjoyed his talk, and normally getting marks for just listening to a professor hold forth in an entertaining manner would be fine by me. But seeing as I am looking to use this education to get work, I would prefer my courses to be a bit more practical.

The whole thing is looking like it will be scary and hard but a lot of fun. I am going to end up writing two feature length movie scripts (eep), the script for a pilot for a TV series (apparently, that’s what the TV industry wants to see, not spec scripts for existing shows) and the second episode as well.

The whole idea is that at VFS, a lot of your schoolwork also builds up your professional portfolio. I am looking forward to that, but I am also a little intimidated by the task. I have never had to write something as long as a feature length movie. And it has to be low budget too, but I am not worried about that. I am confident in my ability to convey lots of tension and action and such via what boils down to people talking in rooms.

Plus there’s the miracles one can pull off with greenscreen technology these days. That doesn’t cost much, and seriously, you can create entire realities around your actors. The people see a lush alien planet with adorable animals and three moons, and in reality, it was an actor in a greenscreen room talking to two ping pong balls on a stick.

I am not really looking to get THAT ambitious, though. A few digital backdrops will be sufficient. Maybe it will be science fiction, maybe not. I have never written standard drama before, so that would be an interesting challenge, but then again, I would love to show off my mad comedy skills.

Maybe I will do a science fiction comedy. I’ve never managed to combine the two before, but there’s always a first time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yesterday was Day 0.

Today was my first full day of classes. It was okay. In the morning, we talked story structure with a guy named Brian, who has done a lot of work in film. We went over all the stuff that is now general knowledge about what, according to Brian, is now the global standard for storytelling. Establish routine, inciting incident, increasing stakes and conflict, etc etc.

The pure artist in me frowns at the fact that apparently storytelling has be reduced to a standardized formula. Where’s the fun in that?

But the side of me that just wants to be able to get work when I am done in 48 weeks is happy that there is now this common language that provides structure in the same way that the form of a sonnet or haiku provides structure, but doesn’t really restrict what you can do all that much.

At least, not if you are creative enough to make it work.

While he explained this stuff, he also told us stories of what it was like to be a working screenwriter, and wow, it sounded tough. All these people lining up to contribute their “input” with “notes” that you are, I assume, meant to implement, at least some of the time. And so many rewrites!

But honestly, I am pretty sure that, at least at first, I would just be glad to be getting work, and would do whatever the morons wanted me to do to my script for as long as they kept on paying me. Once I have built up enough money, I can make my own movies with green screen and such.

Then again, maybe I will skip the Hollywood step and do my own stuff while I am a VFS student and have access to their facilities and equipment. I glimpsed a room at 420 Homer that was entirely green screen. Walls, ceiling, floor. Imagine what I could do in there with the right people!

Namely, technical people. I can write it and I can direct it, and help with the design aspects of implementation a little. Heck, I can even edit the darn thing, as long as it’s not too complicated. But what I can’t do is lighting, sound, and special effects.

So I must go a-wandering in the two campi some time, in search of technical types! Come, join my mad coterie of lyrical lunatics and jovial jesters! We’re going to make WILD ART!

Makes me sound almost chaotic, really. Well, I have my moments.

In the afternoon, we had TV Genre with Rick Drew, and he and I hit it off immediately. I showed up for class early and chose a seat near him, because deep down I am a teacher’s pet and being near the teacher makes me feel safe.

He mentioned that he was developing a miniseries based on the time Buffalo Bill took his western adventure show to England. And as it turns out, I know enough about that subject to ask pertinent and intelligent questions about his project, and just like that, the ice was broken, or at least dented.

Then later, I got up and closed a curtain when it was time to watch a movie, and he seemed to appreciate that.

But the most amazing thing happened when he said something about one of his first jobs in TV was as a writer for one of the worst sitcoms of all time, and jokingly I said “Check It Out?”

AND IT WAS. He was amazed. So was I. He really was a writer for Check It Out! I thought I was making a joke about an obscure Canadian sitcom and I absolutely nailed it. Wow.

When he asked me how I knew, I said “Well, when you put ‘terrible sitcom’ and ‘Canadian’ together…… ”

Hardly a logically complete answer, I admit. What about Mosquito Lake and Schitt’s Creek and basically every other Canadian sitcom that wasn’t Corner Gas?

After the morning class, I was really hoping that it would turn out that TV writing had less bullshit involved that writing for film. But then we watched this documentary about the making of an episode of Homicide : Life On The Street, which followed this one writer named Yakumura (Japanese guy with a total Baltimore accent) from the idea for the episode (the episode is called “The Accident” if you are curious) all the way to it being a finished episode, and wow was it a lot of work. Rick said it’s not uncommon for the writers to work 80 to 100 hours a weeks while the show is in production. And it involved almost as many corporate animals coming to pee in your pool as well.

And I honestly, I was starting to wonder what the hell I’d gotten myself into, and wondering if I should have stuck with being a science fiction writer. Novelists don’t have to put up with that kind of crap!

But of course, they do, at least in traditional publishing.

Anyhow, that was just the voice of feeling a tad overwhelmed by it all on my first real day of classes. I am sure I will get with the flow and my future brilliant career as a mover and shaker in the television biz, trading heavily on my wit, charm, and talent, will seem at least a little more realistic soonishly.

I will probably need to get more paper for my binders and start behaving like an actual student soon. I was foolishly hoping that maybe this would be such a radical, hands-on form of education that it would not require note taking and so on. But nerp, some of it will be required.

Besides, taking notes gives me something to do with my excess energies and helps me pay attention.

Spent part of lunch break chatting with my fellow students in the break room/kitchen. Well, mostly this one chick talked. But the important thing was that I participated and was social. There was even a moment of truth where someone saw me looking in on the kitchen conversation and said “Come on in, we have room!”.

For a moment, I was all “Well, I didn’t mean to, uh…. ” but then I overcame that and said “OK”.

And it was quite nice!

So I am making little bitty baby steps towards fixing my social damage and becoming the me that I know is straining to get out.

Soon, big fella. Soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So far, so good.

Did the second orientation, the one just for us writers. We all introduced ourselves and said where we were from, and WOW. Four girls from Mexico, one from Indonesia, a guy from Sweden, another ftom Scotland, another from the UK, a girl from India, a guy from Baltimore, two people from Nova Scotia, and just for marvelous contrast, a dude from downtown Vancouver, where we are right now.

And those are just the ones I can remember!

I am writing this sitting in the basement computer lab at 198 West Hastings, the VFS building where the Writing department is located. I am not super happy about this, because all the others magically broke into groups and went to lunch, and here I am, all by myself.

I obviously have my work cut out for me when it comes to overcoming my tendency to isolate myself. I want in, dammit. So I am determined to make friends and socialize, both for my future career and my own personal development.

Oh… and to land me a boyfriend.

Turns out that part 2 of the orientation today is our tech orientation., which starts soon. I wonder how much of it I already know.

Got my swag bag, which turned out yo be an actual VFS backpack. Score!

(—)

Back home now, fed and ready to blog.

Also in the swag bag : the aforementioned umbrella, our two keycards (you should see one of them, the technology is ancient, the thing is like an inch thick), a copy of Strunk and White (the non-union equivalent of Funk and Wagnall), a copy of Save The Cat by Blake Synderm book I have been wanting to read forever and which I sadly seem to have lost (major sadface), some other screenwriting book I also seem to have lost, and my very own VFS water bottle of the translucent black plastic variety.

Translucent black plastic – another 70’s thing coming back into style!

I did one dumb thing today – I wore my coat. And I almost didn’t. I had already called the elevator, jacket free, when suddenly I thought “But what if it’s cold out right now?” and went and got it.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Then I was stuck with the big heavy thing all day, and today was definitely not jacket weather. I already have problems dealing with heat (like being fat AND prone to heat stroke, yay) and wearing a big black leather jacket didn’t help.

Had some general free-floating anxiety on the way there. Partly that was because I slept very poorly last night and woke up very oxygen depleted and feeling bad, but a lot of it was probably because I drank a liter of Diet Coke with breakfast, and caffeine is always a gamble for me.

Sure, I’m awake. Awake and jittery! My anxieties don’t need the extra help. I won’t do the same thing tomorrow.

Part of the orientation was a tour of the various places we would need to know about for our classes, and when they told us that, I was having horrible flashbacks to Thursday. But it turned out everything is either in the 198 West Hastings building (floor four, the writer’s floor) or a couple of places at the 420 (stoner laugh) Homer Street building, which is quite large.

And the 420 Homer building is only a block away from 19th West, so it’s no big deal. I had this vision of having to travel the length and bridth of downtown Vancouver to hit all my classes. The horror.

We also got our schedules, of course, although they immediately told us that anything can change at any minute. That’s because most of the instructors are there part-time, and the rest of the time they are working in the actual entertainment industry.

How cool is that?

But because of such instabilities, we are required to check our VFS email twice a day. And I can’t just forward it to my Gmail like I did at Kwantlen. So I will have to actually log on to their web portal for the email twice a day, like a slave.

What else…. tech orientation took like, half an hour. It was just a matter of showing us how to log in to various services, like email, WiFi, and Moodle.

Pretty sure I was the only one of the students who wasn’t like, “Moodle? What the heck is that?”.

Oh, and on the way home, I had a very nice ten dollar lunch at a funky little sandwich shop called Bon Chaz. It had all the things I look for in funky little businesses.

Menus done with flourescent markers on big black boards, check.
Little jokes in said menus, check.
Indie-looking young woman behind the counter, check.
Hippie-ish indie music player, check. Mellow and harmless, but not offensively so.
Lots of mentions of vegan alternatives, check.
and last but the opposite of least…
BIG COMFY CHAIRS! CHECK!

These sorts of things mean a lot to us fatties. We are not built to sit on hard furnishings. Our poor buttocks try to compensate for our weight by becoming very fat and cushiony themselves, but they just can’t keep up with our mass, and so all that weight is bearing down on not nearly enough surface area to spread it, and hence, the pressure on our butts is enormous.

That’s Physics for Fatties 101.

Bon Chaz (which to me, sounds like someone under-pronouncing “bonne chance”, French for “good luck”) had good food. They have this deal where you can get 2 of four things – soup, sandwich, pasta, salad) and a drink for $9.50, which is decent, especially for downtown Vancouver.

I got a turkey wrap and potato salad, and they were both excellent. The wrap was very fresh tasting, and that counts big with me. Excellent lettuce. And the potato salad, despite being sort of greenish with green bits in it, was also very good.

So I have that place on my mental rolodex now. I really wish I could afford to do that kind of thing every day I am at school, but that would cost $50 a week and that’s half my budget right there. So I will have to brown-bag it at least some of the time.

Plus, I am really not keen on fighting through the scrum of people all getting their lunch at the same time, between noon and 1 pm. So brown bagging it might be the only solution.

Anyhow, all in all, I enjoyed today. But what I am really looking forward to is tomorrow, when classes actually start.

Orientation is over…. I’m ready to LEARN.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve talked many times before about how my childhood, and my adult life, have had very little challenge in them. School was easy, blah blah blah.

But today I want to talk about how this lack of challenge also meant a lack of authority in my life. This came up in therapy. I realized that I have never truly experienced authority. Between how willful and defiant I could be and the fact that I was smarter than most adults plus the neglect I suffered, there was never anyone in my life who could assert authority over me.

People who had a very different kind of childhood under strict authoritarian parents might think that sounds wonderful. But it’s not. It’s extremely unhealthy. I never had the feeling that someone was looking out for me. I never felt like there was someone who could keep me from making mistakes. I never felt supported by a set of rules of any sort. There was nobody who could or would put me in my place, and therefore I never knew what my place was.

No wonder I never fit in.

And of course, when I was a kid, I had no idea what was wrong. No child, no matter how precocious, is wise enough to know they need more discipline. Looking back, I can see how much happier I was when I had my babysitter Betty or my teacher Mrs. Rogers in my life because they had strong enough wills and personalities to handle me. But it would never have occurred to me to seek out that kind of person, let alone start acting out in order to bring down the discipline I craved.

Oh no. I was far too sensible and smart and reasonable (and timid) to do that. Less unrelentingly precious and therefore head-forward kids act out of emotion alone, and therefore, I didn’t instinctively take care of my own emotional needs. I didn’t look for what I need without knowing it, I didn’t advertise my pain in order to elicit a nurturing (or disciplining) response from those around me, and I didn’t fight for what I wanted at all.

All because I was so “sensible”. For as long as I can remember, I had a level of self-control that seems downright pathological when examined over a lifetime, especially my childhood. I place a very high value on choosing my actions, and that sounds very noble according to a standard Western table of values, but in practice it makes nearly all healthy expression of emotion impossible.

Because it’s not like I find a way to express those overridden emotions at a later date. When I deny my emotions their expression in the interests of self-control, they remain unexpressed indefinitely. It’s like a form of death of one’s inner life. Not the safe inner world of thoughts and ideas and contemplation, of course, but the far realer world of emotion, instinct, and passion, raw and intense.

That kind of thing might lead to acting without thinking about it first, and we can’t have that.

I am learning, slowly. The world doesn’t end when I go with my gut sometimes. It’s okay to be in situations where I will not have time to think things through. I am more than my intellect.

I don’t know why I was such a self-controlled kid. Maybe it comes with the territory when you are as bright as me – that emotional override switch. Maybe it was my response to the trauma of being sexually abused – to kind of empty myself out and retreat into the chilly confines of the intellect, which kept me from having to feel things so much. Maybe it was part of my desire to please – being all cool and reasonable and understanding made me a “good boy” in the eyes of my siblings and parents – in that it made me easier to ignore. And maybe it was part of my desperately trying to catch up to my siblings and fit in with them.

No matter how you slice it, though, it’s just not normal. It’s like I never really was a kid. I had far too much responsibility for myself to let loose, play, have fun, and just be myself. I ended up retreating deep, deep within myself, and everything I am got transferred into being bright.

And that turned out to be not that difficult for me. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if someone had just taken the time to challenge me. If they had managed to get me excited about it, then maybe I would have learned to look for it myself. I can’t say for sure – due to my option paralysis issues, I am still the sort of person who, if told by some well-meaning person to “just go to the library and study whatever I want!”, would end up frozen to the spot by indecision. So maybe I was never going to be a self-starter.

But still. It would have been nice to have someone in my life who paid attention to me on more than a “is it still breathing? Good. ” basis. No child should be so alone, and at such an early age. Perhaps if I had been a more robust specimen, I would responded to it by developing a kind of feral scrappiness and determination to look out for Numero Uno (because nobody else did).

Instead, I withdrew into myself, and all I developed was an ability to keep going no matter what – but only when I had school as a supplier of external goals and validation. And in a sense I retained that ability to just keep going no matter what into depressed adulthood.

No matter what, I didn’t fall apart, I didn’t go do crazy shit, I didn’t harm myself, and I kept up what minimal obligations I had. I never got irritable with anyone, and of course, I retained self-control nearly all of the time.

Fat lot of fucking good it did me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.