Not feeling the words today. I would really rather not have to blog today because it means having to structure my time and plan and whatnot and I do enough of that during the week. But I am being treated to a movie by my dear friend William, and so it is definitely worth it, and it’s just my lazy whiny Jagoff side that is bitching about that kind of thing.

We are going to see the latest version of The Jungle Book, the live action-ish version. I have heard good things about it. And I am pretty sure I can go into it with a mostly open mind and not judge it solely by the standard of the original Disney classic that is one of my top three Disney flicks (tied for second with Disney’s Robin Hood).

I wonder if there is singing in this one? I hope not. That would make it harder for me to keep the two distinct and separate in my mind.

I mean, what new song could compete with this?

I am intrigued by the fact that Kaa the snake is voiced as female this time. The original scene has such a potent pedo vibe that it makes me wonder if the gender switch was to counter some of that. If so, then it was futile, as there are plenty of female pedos preying on little boys out there too. And they generally don’t get caught because people want pedophilia to be as alien as possible to them, to locate it as far away (in the hands of random male perverts) rather than face the truth, which is that most molestation is by a trusted family member and women are as likely to offend as men.

Boy, that got real dark real fast!

Let’s return to the relative safety of implied cartoon pedophilia, rather than the real world stuff. Here’s the scene in question.

That scene makes me rather uncomfortable now. It’s so goddamned pervy, to the point where I have trouble thinking Kaa intends to eat Mowgli. Nobody gets that excited and seductive about a meal.

Not a lot else going on in my life right now. It’s great that I will have tomorrow off in addition to the usual weekend. I will take pains to search the upcoming week for boobytraps in the form of homeowkr I have not done or classes I should be preparing for or whatnot. I am pretty sure I am current, but it doesn’t hurt to check.

I know that I have already done my little presentation of one of my script ideas and that it is sitting on my student account, waiting for me to print off enough copies for the class. I haven’t done that yet because I am not very good at keeping things looking nice and clean, and if I had already printed them, they would have gotten all rumpled and crinkled and messed up in my bag despite my best intentions.

So I will have to do the printing the “day of”, so to speak.

Today is going to be a very busy day for me. First the movie, then my birthday dinner, then the BCSFA meeting, then hanging out with the usual suspects till 3 am. I can feel the cramped up socially crippled part of me going “nooooo, don’t make me do that, I need to be able to scuttle back into my hidey hole and hide from the world until the scary things go away at all times!”

But I don’t. I will be just fine. I kinda wish I had more time to sleep, but that’s sort of my default state of being lately, so I am used to it. Besides, I can’t trust my sleepiness. Sometimes it’s legit, and sometimes it’s just a psychosomatic attic insane sleepiness created to give me an excuse to retreat from the world and its anxiety inducing overstimulation and general loudness and scariness and so on.

But hey, if you don’t endure, you don’t adapt. You have to stick with it long enough for you to adapt to the new situation, at which point it will stop being so painful and scary. That’s the real lesson for those of us who have spent time in the prison of our own anxieties. If you hang in there, and do your best to stop resisting the situation and resisting change in general, you will adapt to the situation and, subjectively speaking, the situation will change.

I went through this with Kwantlen. When I first got there, the building seemed massive and confusing, the noise and activity levels were very scary to me, and finding and attending my classes seemed like trying to find my way through a maze made of anxiety and noise.

But I kept at it, and over the weeks the place shrank in my mind, and the hallways seemed less crowded and loud, and what was painful before became easy and normal and good.

And what’s more, I took the knowledge of this process with me into VFS. I was quite anxious at the beginning, and the layout of the department seemed confusing, and my fellow students seemed like they were judging me. But I knew it would pass, and it did. I am going into Week 4 of my 48 weeks at VFS, and it’s all old hat to me now. I am slowly learning to socially integrate with my classmates, and I have a good idea what is expected of me, and so now… it’s just school.

And I am good at school.

One interesting thing about the social integration thing : many profs have told us that the class I am in, Writing Class 52, has gelled socially far faster than any other group they have had. I would like to think I am a small part of that. Despite all my anxieties and strangeness, I put out a gentle, inclusive, and harmonious vibe that makes it easier for people to feel like they belong.

And that’s with me still fairly socially crippled.

Imagine what I will be able to do when I am all healed up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My childhood, that is.

I am halfway through watching Team Foxcatcher, the real story behind the events depicted in the movie Foxcatcher, and let me tell you, I really feel bad for John DuPont.

For one thing, I identify with him. I know what it is like to grow up socially isolated like he did. And he had it far worse than I ever did. I mean, this poor guy had never had a meal with another human being until he was 13 years old. All his meals were brought to him by the maid. Everyone he knew worked for his family. He had siblings but they were all older and had little to do with him.

And I identify with that a million percent.

I know what it’s like to be forgotten. To be too timid to ever ask for attention or advocate for your own needs, and therefore to have to learn to be self-sufficient in a really terrible way. You don’t learn how to live, let alone thrive, but you do learn how to… get by. How to not quite starve. How to cling to the tiniest shreds of human warmth you get.

How to be pathetically grateful that a cashier was kind of nice to you.

Luckily for me, I didn’t have the option of buying friends. I figure I am better off for that, on the whole. I would rather have sincere loneliness than insincere closeness any day of the week. At least when you are alone, you know where you stand.

But John didn’t have that. Like a lot of people who grow up rich, he learned to be paranoid about whether people really liked him or just saw him as a big bag of money. But not too paranoid… he always had a rather pathetic credulity, willing to do anything for people who made him feel like he had a friend.

That’s so pathetic it makes my whole soul sad. And like I said… I can very much relate.

A lot of times in my life, I met someone who made me feel less alone and then clung to that person despite the fact that the person obviously didn’t really want me around. But when you are that lonely, you will ignore all but the firmest and clearest of signals to go away.

Like the dog who comes back, tail wagging, no matter how many times he gets kicked. Because sometimes he does not get kicked, and gets to hang around and feel like he belongs for a while.

John was so much like me, but worse. We see him in the documentary at age 55, but he clearly still has the emotional patterns of a child. Like fixating on someone and wanting to be around them all the time. And a strong need to be liked. And, sadly, a certain instability in his sense of reality.

According to the doc, he had his good days and his bad days, and on his bad days, things got pretty weird.

Like, they tell one story of a time when John called to say he needed to be rescued because his brand new Lincoln was floating in the estate’s pond. Everyone thought, well, okay, he was going too fast around the pond, could happen to anyone. So the auto shop gives him a loaner to use while the Lincoln dried out.

The very next day, John has a very important Russian wrestling official in the back seat of the loaner, and does the exact same thing again. Drives the loaner right into the pond. What a weirdo, right?

Well as a similar breed of weirdo, I can tell you exactly why he did it, both times. Because by driving into the pond, he made people express concern over him and display care by coming to rescue him. That’s exactly the sort of thing I can imagine myself doing if I were a little less stable. There have been times when I seriously contemplated inflicting harm on myself just to get the caring attention I craved.

Luckily, I am too sane to actually do that kind of thing. Nope, not me. I would never do something that would be so obviously a cry for help.

In fact, I never cry for help at all.

If you are wondering about the title, Foxcatcher was the name of the athletic compound John built for the various athletes he more or less adopted, particularly wrestlers. Another poignant detail from the doc is that all the wrestlers worked together to let John pretend to be a wrestler like them. To be “part of the team”. He trained with them, wrestled with them, even entered wrestling competitions with them, all to feel like one of the boys.

But he was in his fifties and frail and slow and so he just plain could not wrestle. The wrestlers would wrestle him and let him win. They’d encourage him to compete. They would put together fake wrestling meets where there would be an audience shouting his name. It’s exactly what you would do for a Make-a-Wish kid… and for a lot of the same reasons.

For most of them, it was out of genuine affection for this clearly very delicate man. He wasn’t just a meal ticket to them. I can imagine someone like that having a profound effect on you. He’s the sort of person who could rouse the nurturing instinct in Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

I am only halfway through the doc, so I don’t know what leads to the tragic end to the story. But I have gotten far enough that he is showing all the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia spiraling out of control, so it is pretty clear that he’s on the wrong path.

And when you are rich and powerful, who is there to save you from yourself? Paranoid schizophrenia is incredibly hard to treat even under the best of conditions.

But with someone like him?

It’s no wonder it all ends in tragedy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.