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.