Someone in particular, that is. Right now I am a cipher made of potentials and possibilities. There’s a lot of people I could be. But the thought of choosing one and sticking with it fills me with the worst possible case of option paralysis.

I suppose the problem is that I am stuck in the “scared animal” mentality that wants there to always be multiple ways out of any situation. And that makes me very hesitant, and that’s a big problem. Healthy people have, largely without knowing it, picked a persona and stuck with it long enough to develop it into something that suits them.

Me, I am stuck at the whole “But what if I pick the wrong thing?” phase. I know, intellectually, that sometimes making the wrong choice is vastly preferable to making no choice at all. By remaining so hesitant and undecided, I deny myself the very spiritual growth I so desperately desire. This leaves me timid and interferes with my ability to deal with life on anything like a realtime basis.

Hence, I am awkward and socially clumsy, and can’t really get on with life and time and growing the fuck up and finally learning to connect with others.

That’s the thing about growing up. The longer you put it off, the harder it’s going to be. But you have to do it anyway… otherwise you will die inside. Root-bound. Growth, as it turns out, is not as optional as we modern people want it to be.

You either do it, or you end up mentally ill from the stresses building up inside you. Impacted growth is the main cause of a lot of the problems of us “failure to launch” types. Depression, rage, bitterness, and that deep deep pain that makes you want to scream and jump out a window… and all because we don’t want to grow up and take on adult responsibilities.

That Peter Pan is an evil son of a bitch, selling us on never growing up like it’s something you can do without any consequences.

I am lucky in that I have no desire to revert to childhood. Not unless it meant actually going back in time with my mind intact. Becoming an actual child now would offer few advantages. If I could revert to any specific biological age and stay there, I would choose to be 25 forever. I was relatively healthy, and energetic, and I had completed my brain growth, so I was out of the woods re : psychosis and other serious mental illnesses.

I’m a brain nerd. I worry about this kind of thing. I was quite relived when I made it out of the “danger zone”, namely the ages between 20 and 25, when things like schizophrenia and psychosis emerge. I have felt like I was on the verge of going crazy for a long time now.

I was glad it didn’t happen. I am mentally ill, true, but I would rather be depressed than deranged any day of the week.

Anyhow, it is clear to me that if I want to continue to grow and recover, I am going to have to learn to just be myself and let the chips fall where they may. It would do me a lot of good if I could turn down my metaconscious a couple of notches so I could live a natural life without constant self-conscious second-guessing and harsh interior judgments.

Clearly, Sheriff Superego is out of control and needs to be reined in. And I know damned well that Mayor Ego can’t do it. It’s in cahoots with the superego.

No, there’s only one force that can fight the fascist government of Sheriff Superego, and that’s the lone gunman known only as the Cincinnati Id.

I better exit this metaphor before I get completely carried away by it.

But the point is valid. Like I keep telling myself, I have been suppressing the ever-loving fuck out of my id for a very long time, and it’s high time I let the poor thing out of its cage so it can get some exercise. Maybe even let it drive some of the time. Silence the voice inside that insists that acting without thinking can only lead to instant disaster and learn to cut loose and live a little.

Easier said than done, of course. I have had this deep paranoia that drives me to overthink everything for a long long time. It is very hard for me to be truly spontaneous. My overwrought mind is constantly busy trying to control outcomes via prediction and anticipation. Always trying to make the smart choice.

Which is, in and of itself, a stupid choice. Life can’t be lived like that. for most people, I suspect, it’s not even an option, and they are all the healthier for that. It takes a certain amount of mental horsepower to be able to sustain an out of control superego. That’s why certain kinds of neurosis are most commonly found in the above-average-IQ set.

You have to be pretty smart to be this fucked up. Not that I am bragging.

I keep coming back to the idea of transcendence. It feels like that is my only hope for anything like transformation. Otherwise I will be stuck very slowly tunneling my way out of this ice prison until I die, never having known true joy or real freedom.

Perhaps I can trigger this sort of experience consciously. Or at least, prepare my mind to solve this problem itself via dreaming. In dreams, there is no superego to interfere with the healing process, and our unconscious mind can sort things out without being bogged down by a need to “understand” what is going on.

Just let it happen, man. Your mind knows what it is doing and is perfectly capable of healing itself. All you have to do is get the fuck out of its way. I know it’s hard to believe in what you cannot predict, let alone control, but sometimes letting go is the only chance you have to regain control of yourself.

Sometimes the only way to make it to your destination is to lay your burdens down and rest a while. They will still be there when you are done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been back at school for two days, and I already have two assignments!

Fine by me. Tonight, I am going to do one of them, plus program all the assignments I can find on Moodle into my student calendar program.

Of course, that comes with inane complications. In order to download stuff to my new-to-me smartphone, I need to connect the app Google Play to my main Google account. Which would not be a problem… if I hadn’t forgotten my Google password.

My web browser knows it… but I don’t. And apparently, I did not see fit to add said password to the file where I keep such things. SO i had to go in and change the password… which of course, requires you to verify your password.

Good thing the browser knows it!

Had this afternoon off (yay!), so I did some errands that needed doing. Did some banking, picked up more insulin from my pharmacy, had a nice lunch at the White Spot in Richmond Centre… and tried to get my smartphone activated so it could live up to the “phone” half of its name. ^[1]

But there’s a snag, and it’s a big one. Turns out Telus’ cheapest cell phone plan is $35/month. Thirty five bucks! No way can I afford that. I was thinking maybe twenty, maximum. So there is no way I am going to sign up for Telus cell phone service, and it is currently a Telus phone.

And that means I am going to have to get someone (probably William) to “jailbreak” the smartphone, or as the cool kids are saying these days, to “root” it. That’s a fancy way of saying that I need someone to revert the thing to its virginal state, i.e., not programmed for any particular cell phone provider.

Then I can shop around for someone who will give me what I need at a price I can afford. It’s called capitalism, baby!

I appreciate that the salesman sized me up and decided that he should talk about the minimum price before we went any further. I suppose I could be offended that he assumed I was poor, but seeing as he was right, I find it hard to take umbrage.

Besides, you can’t get a decent price for umbrage any more, anyway. Not in this economy.

I think I have mentioned this before in this space, but I think the economy, or rather The Economy, is today’s modern secular capitalist religion. Entire nations make massive changes to how they do things because The Economy’s official priest class, namely economists, say that it must be done in order to appease The Economy. People lose their jobs and have their entire lives uprooted because the priests say this is what The Economy commands. We are told daily to lower our expectations because we should just be glad we even have jobs when The Economy is so angry with us.

The fact that these lowered expectations serve the interests of the anti-capitalist plutocratic overlords who never liked freedom in the first place is, I am sure, just a happy coincidence.

Imagine what would happen if society simply stopped believing in The Economy, or rather, in economists. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Economics is 99 percent bullshit anyhow, and has a lot more to do with professors getting tenure and lending plausibility to the overlord’s rapacious usury than anything resembling real results. No matter what you believe, you can find an economist who agrees with you and who can provide excellent ideological cover for your poorly thought out beliefs.

“You think I am wrong? Well this economist says I am right, and has a lot of very impressive jargon and intimidating charts to back up my beliefs. So unless you are prepared to argue with my economist on his home ground, you can’t prove I’m not right!”

These are the people who really pull the strings. They show up on the doorstep of leaders and use their powers of obfuscation and dissembly to undermine the leader’s confidence and convince the leaders that only by doing what The Economy wants (as interpreted, of course, by economists) can prosperity be insured.

This is the real way democracy is subverted and bypassed in the modern era. The economist class counts on most people’s unwillingness or inability to try to understand complex math-based systems to twist the arm of governments, basically saying “You have to either do what I tell you to do, or learn to understand all this complicated stuff yourself!”.

What the world needs, then, are more politicians who are willing to treat these people like the snake-oil salesmen they are and show them the door. Or at the very least, pit them against each other. Pick the economist(s) who agree with what you were going to do anyway, and when these anti-democratic servants of the plutocracy show up, refer them to your pet economist, and leave them to argue it out.

“Well, this is clearly too complicated for me to understand, so I will just do what seems right to me until you two can reach an agreement, okay?”

Then you can go about doing what is actually right, and make the numbers serve your agenda instead of ceding sovereignty to charlatans with spreadsheets. I am someone who does understand complex systems, and I can tell you that you (or someone bright working for you) can work those numbers to make shit do what you want it to do.

Not by lying or stealing or committing fraud, either. Just by having the balls and brains to look at something like a budget and apply a more humanistic set of priorities to it. Look for money being wasted on bullshit that doesn’t serve the people (or worse, acts directly against their interests), and move it to the things people actually need in order to be happy, relaxed, and productive.

And whaddaya know, the economy suddenly booms!

Because liberalism actually fucking works.

Take that you fucking servants of Mammon!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But I’m not sure I can.

I’ve talked many times before about my lack of faith. If you define faith as “belief without evidence”, then I can’t do it. Everything I believe is based on evidence of some sort, whether it be the kind observed in reality or the end product of a chain of reasoning. I have certain fundamental beliefs which I would describe as not open to debate and rooted in deep emotion instead of reason. For instance, I need no evidence to go on thinking it matters what happens to people who aren’t me. I also don’t need to be convinced of the logic of pragmatism. I hold that to be self-evident.

But other than that, if I have faith, it operates well below the conscious level. I suppose I must have some form of faith that is a priori to evidence and not dependent upon it. To me, it’s entirely possible that the human mind simply can’t function without some kind of faith.

It certainly can’t operate without any assumptions, despite what Descartes, that intellectual remora eel, would have you believe. And what are assumptions but a form of faith?

So what I lack is not assumptions. It’s more like a foundational layer of belief that everything will be okay. I think that’s one of the major things that religion provide which secular society cannot, as yet, replicate. The devout are never truly alone, because God (by whatever name) is always with them. It soothes our primate brains immensely to imagine that there is a powerful but benevolent patriarch watching over us and protecting us from harm at all time.

That’s why Judaism had to beget Christianity, by the way. God had to become more than just a way to explain the world, or just another petty and capricious tyrant.

He had to become nice.

Now I say I am incapable of faith in that senses, but that is a diagnosis based entirely on how I am and how I think right now. To me, it is entirely possible that a transcendental incident of sufficient magnitude could open my mind up and give me an experience so deep and profound that I must accept it as real, no matter how I got to that point.

I assume it would be drugs. Or transcranial magnetic stimulation.

When I ponder the transcendental in such a fashion, it makes me feel like my intellectual fortress is a puny and brittle thing compared to the enormity of faith. I can understand why the devout pity the unbeliever. They know that they have drawn enormous comfort and strength from their faith, and can only assume that without it, your life has to be one of bitterness and despair.

And they are not entirely wrong.

And perhaps the human mind requires this sort of faith in order to be healthy. I am sure that there are plenty of atheists who are genuinely happy people and would claim to be better off without religion, and they are not wrong.

But there’s a big difference between rejecting religion and lacking faith. I think it probable that once religious faith is installed, it can’t ever be uninstalled fully. You can remove the dogma, but not the underlying emotional supports. Those are the real benefits of religious faith. The rest of it is simply an interface for this deep wellspring of wellbeing.

However, I grew up ignored, neglected, abused, and isolated, and without even the hint of any sort of religious faith to offer relief. Instead, I had my mighty but unmagical mind. I lack that vital ability to synthesize the antidote to my own poisons – to imagine what I would need in order to correct my mood then forget I had imagined it so I can believe it to be revealed truth.

This sort of revelation is anathema to traditional Western thought, which prizes objectivity and detachment and bids us to pursue the truth no matter how it makes us feel. The idea of the products of the imagination being taken as real, even in a purely emotional sense, offends the Western mind and its inflexible delineation of the line between what is “real” and what is not.

Never mind the fact that, as phenomenology teaches, there is no such thing as an experience that is not real. To suppose that such a thing is possible would mean to accept that unreal causes can have real effects, which is clearly utter nonsense.

If someone hallucinates that they are being attacked by wolves, that hallucination is real. It really happened. And the resulting fear, panic, and screaming are also real things that really happened. The error of our poor psychotic is that of misidentifying a mental event as an objective event.

But it makes no sense to describe the wolves as “unreal”. Then what caused the fear, panic, and screaming? To the psychotic, they were very real, and that means that anyone who says the wolves were “ann in their head” is going to be viewed by the psychotic as a lunatic.

Perhaps that’s one of the things animistic societies get right. With an unlimited palette of spirits to call upon to explain things, they need not treat mental events as unreal. They are just a different sort of reality than the everyday reality of the mundane aspects of life.

But without a transformational transcendent event, such things will be closed off to me. And I am not that eager to seek such an experience. My sort of mind tends to suffer from a kind of existential cowardice that views all unpredictable experiences past a certain level of randomness to be madness and chaos and not the sort of thing any right minded person would choose to experience.

That’s what lack of faith does to a person. You end up with an unshakable belief that the universe is inherently malign and that therefore what cannot be predicted and/or controlled can only end in disaster.

Hey, I guess I have faith in something after all!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Everyone needs the company of equals.

It’s inherent in our need for the approval of our peers. For that, you kind of need peers. No matter how hard we strive to gain status, and elevate ourselves, we still need people of equal status with whom to associate. It’s only with equals that we can be ourselves.

But this is a tricky subject, because your peers are also your status competitors. The human need for community comes into conflict with the equally human need for status. The exact same people you consider to be “us” are also the ones who might stab you in the back to get one step up the ladder.

And you might do the same to them, if the circumstances were right.

Thus you get the petty micro-competition of middle-class families. Income wise, everyone in the middle class is roughly equal. At the very least, the differences are not so stark as to be a major social barrier. The lawyer making $80K a year doesn’t feel out of place associating with the professor who makes $50K.

The game, therefore, is played on a very small field, and like they say about academic life, the competition is so fierce precisely because the stakes are so small. In the grand scheme of things, it matters not a whit whether you keep up with those pricks the Joneses. It’s not going to have a big impact on your life. Nothing of substance is actually being gained or lost.

But status competition is hard-wired into every single human being’s DNA. The only thing that changes is the peer group. An academic might well turn up their nose at all that petty one-upmanship the bourgeoisie indulge in because they are not as refined and detached as we of the academic set, who are of course above all that. ^[1]

And yet, they will be sure to say it around people they are trying to impress, and aim it rather pointedly at their chief rival. You know, the one they secretly despise and consider a fraud and a failure. The one they would rather die than see succeed, and whom they badmouth every chance they get. The one they really hope to see fail some day, and when they do fail (as they surely must, being so inferior), it will be clear to all who the better academic (in whatever field) is, and you will consider that justice.

And this extends into other arenas that supposedly don’t worry about that kind of thing as well. Like various people in religious orders (monks, nuns, priests, etc), who might very well eschew the outside trappings of worldly status, but only because that’s what they have to do in order to be a member of a high-status group (the pious, who are always higher status than the laity), and then within that group compete for status based on who is the most favored by the ultimate status-giver, God himself.

So the equality we seek can be tricky to find if we are acutely status-conscious. That’s the main reason why the modern human, who gets many conflicting signals from a free and ‘equal’ society, needs to be told to ignore what other people think of them and just be themselves.

That’s the only way to escape the status game completely. And it resolves the latent conflict between the cultural value of individuality and the status seeking urges we all share. Individuality says we are as good as anyone else, and society reinforces that message in many ways. But “comparing yourself to others” denies that equality, and so, in a sense, one of the most important adaptions to modern life us naked beach apes can make is to turn off our status seeking urges completely.

Well, okay. Mostly.

This is not done by a simple act of will, of course. One does not simply shut down a deep primal instinct that we’ve had since we were swinging from tree to tree. Rather, it is the end product of a long spiritual journey wherein the individual must confront one’s feeling of status inadequacy and resolve them to the point where you can truly believe that no matter what, you are “okay”.

That you are adequate. Sufficient. Good enough. Worthy. A good person. A good citizen. The same feeling has many faces, but they all represent the same thing : self-worth.

In my own case, I might seem like a person who operates outside the usual status environment. Like a lot of nerds, I don’t pay attention to things like clothing or family connections or who has a bigger flatscreen TV or any of that bourgeoisie bullshit. Someone could be totally crushing me on that front and I wouldn’t even notice, let alone care.

But I know better. I know that I, too, simply have a different arena for my status desires. I really want people to think I am brilliant, and I long to be recognized as such. One of the reasons I want to write for TV is that I want to have a way to show off my talents in a way that will actually put them to use. I want people to be amazed by my talent and awed by my intellect and delighted by my witty and warm personality and who go away from encountering me thinking “wow, that was one amazing dude!”.

At the same time, I want to be around people like me. People who get me. People around whom I can feel comfortable because they think like I do on a fundamental level. People with lively intellects and a deep curiosity about life. People who like thinking about things, and even more importantly, like discussing things.

This is the human condition. To always compete and to always need the company of our peers.

Being sentient is so complicated.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It just occurred to me that I am always at least a little dizzy.

Dunno why that never occurred to me before. I suppose when it’s your “normal”, it takes a very tricky form of metacognition to perceive it. I am just so accustomed to being slightly dizzy from (I think) fluid in my ears and sinuses. I move, and the fluid in my head shifts, and I feel the dizziness, like my body wants to keep going even after I have stopped moving, and I have to compensate for that.

Jaysus, no wonder I am so fucking clumsy. It’s a wonder I can get around at all.

I don’t think it was always this way. I have the distinct feeling that it began at some point, possibly when my allergies first kicked in hardcore when I was in high school, this become the new normal. I am a dizzy person, in more ways than one.

Even sitting here typing, I can feel it. Not sure that’s a good thing. I get the feeling that I might come to regret bringing this sensation to the front of my consciousness before it gets any better. Now I will be thinking about it all the time, and I will have to be very careful to make sure to not let that go to my head and end up magnifying the problem.

After all, when we pay attention to something, we naturally zoom in on it. But then…. we forget we did that, and end up thinking tiny things are huge problems.

Knowing now that I have been at least a little dizzy for a long time, it makes me wonder how much that has contributed to my burden of life and, through that, my feeling that life is just too damned hard. I can see it contributing to a feeling of life-draining heaviness. And even more than that, a feeling like I am only safe and in control when I move at little as possible.

That’s a feeling which has had me in its grips for a very long time now. Makes me wonder what my life would be like if I could rid myself of this perpetual vertigo.

I might find life to be a heck of a lot easier.

Now I don’t want to be alarmist about this. I am not saying I live with anything catastrophic. It’s more like a small but constant thing that is always there in the background of my mind, sometimes better and sometimes worse, that makes life that little bit harder.

Relatedly, I have often wondered how the fluctuations in sinus pressure in my head changes things for the rest of my head, especially my brain. To me, it seems entirely possible that one of the reasons my local reality seems so unstable to me is that blood circulation in my big ol’ brain is sometimes squeezed about by pressure in my sinus cavities, and that messes me up in both subtle and overt ways.

Certain, when I am experiencing my legendarily easy to provoke heat sickness, it feels like some enormous pressure is being applied to some portion of my brain. And what do you know, I usually get dizzy too.

Makes me wonder if I maybe have malformed sinus cavities or somesuch. I am pretty sure the average person does not go through what I go through. There has to me some explanation for why I have had these irritating sinus issues my whole life. Just calling them “allegies” is clearly an inadequate explanation. There has to me more going on. The allergies are just the trigger.

And I don’t really think of them as allergies anyhow. That’s just the most convenient word to use in order to get the basic idea across. No one thing sets them off, as far as I can tell. So it’s either a host of allergies with the same symptoms, or something more like having irritable sinuses that might get freaked out by anything it decides has to go.

The allergy pills I take do seem to help. But that might just be the sinus medicine portion of them. When I take a straight-up antihistamine with nothing else added, my results tend to be inconclusive. Maybe they are helping, and maybe not. I still sneeze sometimes when I am on them.

That pisses me off.

So I guess I am fucked up in the head in more than one way. I could try to figure out how to get to my doctor and talk to him about it despite my rather busy academic schedule, but that’s a long-shot. The stupid nine to five world kind of gets in the way.

What do you know, my doctor’s office is only open during the exact same hours when everybody is at work. As is everything else. How fucking convenient.

And the thing is, I would be more likely to take a day off work than I would be to take a day off school. Missing work is just a matter of figuring out how to get your work done while you are not there.

But with school, I might actually miss something important. Something that would have helped me a lot. Even if I was the sort of person who could ask someone to take notes for me/share their notes with me, I would be paranoid that they had not captured the true experience, with vocal tones and body language and such.

Because I’m complicated like that.

The obvious solution is to get a doctor that is close to school. That way I could go on my lunch break, or after school. I like my current doctor, Doctor Chao, but I can’t say I am particularly attached to him. So it wouldn’t be a huge trauma for me to switch.

Seems weird for it to be more convenient to have a doctor far away from my home than to have one six blocks from me, but that’s life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t bring a knife to a…? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Gun fight. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. That’s what I have been doing in Fallout 4. And it’s not going so great.

It was going okay, this whole idea of being the post apocalyptic barbarian swinging his sword to kill the bad guys and protect the innocent people of the Commonwealth. Sure, I got shot up a few times, but not so much that it made the whole thing seem impossible.

But then I came across my first large area full of bad guys (fucking Raiders), and that’s when having to be close to the enemy in order to strike really started to suck. When like eight people are shooting at you at the same time, you die pretty fast, and when you can’t take enemies out at a distance, reducing the number of shooters takes too long.

Honestly, if I hadn’t picked up a companion who can fire a pistol, I probably never would have made it through at all.

As a result, I am seriously considering starting over AGAIN and this time designing my character to be less “post nuclear Conan” and more like “silent deadly ninja”. I think there’s a fairly good chance that I could get good enough (both in game skill and personal skill) at being sneaky to take the enemies out one by one, commando style. And you have to admit, that would be awesome.

Or, I could stick with my current dude but devote all my levels to making him into a living tank. Build up his personal damage resistances to the point where he could be running around nekkid (murr) and still seem like he’s bulletproof.

And, of course, devote resources to modding his armor up in the same way.

It feels a little lame to have to do that, and kind of makes me feel like this whole idea was ill-advised. But I can be very, very stubborn, and as long as I feel like I can make it work, I will stick with it. Nothing wrong with realizing you maybe didn’t think things through all the way. Especially when there’s still a chance you can fix it.

Meanwhile, in the real world (that pesky thing), today has been very, very quiet. Julian has been off dog-walking, and Joe is, of course, at work, so I have had the apartment all to myself since 3:30 pm or so. Long enough for the silence to go from soothing to kind of creepy.

And, as usual when I have time off like this, I have been battling depression and the resulting sleepiness. I’m never that far from the void, it seems, and while I haven’t been sad per se , I haven’t exactly felt wonderful either.

Mostly I have felt… adrift. Unmoored. Directionless. I know damned well that I have work to do on that final draft of my short script, but it’s hard to get myself moving in that direction. It’s so much easier to go back to the life that stole 20 years of my fucking life : eating, sleeping, and playing video games.

And chatting online, although I am less and less inclined to do that, and that frightens me. No matter how bad my depression has gotten in the past, I always spent time hanging with the fuzzies and doing Facebook and such.

And now it seems like it’s more hassle than it’s worth. So much easier to keep to myself and not have to deal with people at all. Even fictional people who only exist in text. Even that seems like too much of a burden, especially when I have a deep and involving video game I could play all by myself.

It’s like my urge to isolate myself has been building up all the time I have been going to school 5 days a week and having to suppress it. And now that I have just a little time off school, I just want to shut out the whole damned world and sink into my inner sanctum where I don’t have to deal with things at all.

Bye bye world. Hello shell. I sure wish I could quit you.

Oh well. No matter what, school resumes on Monday, and I will have no choice but to snap the fuck out of it and get things done. I realized today that my resistance to school has been building for quite some time now. IT’s that same voice that was causing troubles for me in my last 2 months at Kwantlen. The voice that says “Why are we sitting here doing this boring ass shit when we could be doing something fun? instead? This shit is so laaaaaaame!”

Needless to say, that voice (and the impulses that go with it) don’t exactly make life easier for me. But I resist the urge to suppress it because it’s an id voice, and I am trying to cultivate my long neglected id. If I am to bring myself back into the land of the living, I will need to make peace with and hopefully integrate my id, because that’s where the life force comes from.

Despite what Western traditional Western thinking tells us, we are not egos and superegos afflicted with the disease of the id. We are ids with egos and superegos installed, somewhat sketchily, and all we do when we suppress our ids and push them out into the cold is deny ourselves any chance of renewal while letting our ids turn into out of control monsters or soul destroying demons.

And if it goes far enough, we end up with depression and/or anxiety and/or a ton of other mental malfunctions.

All this Freud talk is making me think I need to get back into regular therapy. I still have a lot of shit to deal with. Stuff needs to be unpacked and aired out and dealt with.

Otherwise I might end up too ill to go to school.

And that would be way too depressing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I didn’t find out if I could get a loan when I was at the bank cashing my cheque. I chickened out. Couldn’t make myself do it. Maybe I will do it tomorrow.

After all, it’s not like I have anything better to do.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I still have to work on the final draft of my short script, Waking the Demon. Have I posted that here yet? I have a half dozen more tweaks to do, two of them fairly major, and so if I get too bored of playing Fallout 4 and naps, I can work on that.

I have officially beaten Fallout 4 once now. Finished the plot. Did not like the ending I got at all. In fact, it bummed me out. I am tempted to see how far back I can go with my save games and make a huge number of different choices. I did not want to end the game by destroying the most developed and technologically advanced civilization in the game, even if they were a bunch of high-handed manipulative slave-owning snobbish pricks.

But they attacked, en masse, my buddies the Minutemen, who are a group of people dedicated to bringing law and order to the innocent peoples of the Wasteland. They were clearly intending to wipe them out. And I just could not allow that.

Anyhow, instead of going back I am currently going forward. I have started over again with a new character, and whereas my first character was a sharpshooter, the new one is a melee weapon specialist, aka a barbarian. Super strong and fast. Not all that bright. Not as bad as Groo, but in the same vein.

So far, it’s been a bumpy adjustment. I have to get used to closing with enemies instead of taking them out at distance. And that means getting my taut muscular ass shot at a lot. Clearly, I am going to have to learn to be really, really quick.

And I am going to need to get a really big sword.

Went to therapy today, for the first time in two months. It went fine. My therapist still has a “cold”, which AFAIK he has had for like… six months. So I am worried about that. They say doctors make the worst patients, and I think that probably extends deep into the “denying they are sick” category. Doctors, after all, have a job with enormous responsibilities, and that kind of thing demands that you develop, if not a big ego exactly, certainly enough self-confidence to believe that you can tell people what to put inside of them and have it actually work.

I can see that leading to a certain blind spot. A person could be so confident in their ability to spot illness that they figure that if they don’t think they are sick, they must not be sick. Even if any other physician would take one look at them and say “You’re sick!”, they cling to the idea that they know best.

Especially the men of a certain generation. The ones that keep dying of things that could have easily been treated if they had just gone to the goddamned doctor. But for whatever reason, these guys don’t go. They have been raised to never show weakness, and in their mind, going to the doctor is basically not just showing weakness in front of a socially dominant authority figure, it’s basically becoming their bitch. So they don’t go.

So glad not to have that problem. I have my own issues with doctors, but at least I go when I am sick.

Anyhow, therapy went fine. Shared my pondering about fitting in and such with my therapist. He is of the opinion that I should stop worrying about it and concentrate on my education. And he’s not entirely wrong. But that’s such a cold way of looking at things that I can’t embrace it. Not fully. I could never be a dedicated careerist kind of person.

To be honest, those type of people tend to get on my nerves. Where’s the joy” Where’s the fun? Where’s the laughter? Where’s the life?

Still, there is a lot to be said for simply accepting who I am. I am probably never going to be the sort of person who can feel comfortable in any kind of social setting I enter. I don’t like the idea that I can only really connect with a tiny percentage of the population, but it’s probably true. And I am not really interested in learning the kind of falseness that seems to be required for social fluency.

Perhaps that has been my problem all along. I just can’t stand being false. I am deeply driven to be myself as I am, warts and all, and that puts me at odds with certain forms of social knowledge. Maybe I will eventually get to the point where I am willing and able to be more flexible about it because I have developed a more secure and stable sense of self and thus can make the kind of trade-off that allows me to trade a little total honesty for better social integration, I sure hope so.

But as it stands now, the very idea of that kind of compromise makes me want to throw up. A deep and powerful voice within me cries out “NEVER!”, and while the rest of me doesn’t necessarily agree, for now, at least, that voice dominates.

So maybe the best course would be to just accept that I am somewhat of a loner, and stop trying to force my square self into the round hole of popularity. Maybe if I can finally accept who and what I am, I will gain enough calmness in social situations to deal with things on a more nuanced level.

And maybe I will lose that air of desperate loneliness that I am pretty sure turns people off right away.

Then there’s this constant need to prove how smart I am….

Let’s just say I have my work cut out for me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

My first term at VFS is officially over, and I don’t have school again till Monday morning.

Showed up for school at 9 am. Went to the classroom. Nobody there. WTF? Turned out the one class I had today was actually in the afternoon. I got it wrong because while it said 1 to 4 pm on the schedule, it said it in the slot that normally has morning classes in it. So I am assigning at least half the blame to the staff members who made the schedule.

They’re the ones who made the mistake, dang it! And at least I wasn’t alone. There was one other student who made the same mistake. I felt like we were brothers in cluelessness.

This left me with a couple of problems. The first was being pissed off that I hauled my ass into school when I could have slept in. But I got over that fairly quickly.

The next was the problem of what to do with the next three hours of my time. Solution : I took a nap in the lounge. Can’t say I slept super well, but it was something. That killed an hour and a half. The rest of the time I read my book and mellowed out.

That got me to 11:30 am, when I got too hungry to concentrate and had to eat lunch. But of course, I didn’t pack a lunch. I didn’t think I would need one. Had my class been in the morning, I would have just eaten when I got home around 1 pm. But nope.

This issue was further complicated by the fact that I was (and still am) broke AF. I had $2.65 to my name, and that doesn’t get you lunch downtown, not even when that $4.95 for everything place is having 33 cent wing day.

I’m not that big on wings anyhow. Especially not the crappy kind they serve at bars. That default “buffalo” wing sauce tastes quite nasty to me.

So I ended up having to put some more Subway on the Education Fund credit card. Damn it. And just for the hell of it, I got a foot-long instead of my usual six inch, and that confirmed something I should have already known : there’s no point in spending the extra two or three bucks because I can’t finish a foot-long any more.

But at least I got to drink that watermelon juice again! Man that stuff is good. I wish I could get a gallon of it. Well, okay, maybe not a gallon…. as much as I love (LOVE!) watermelon, I would probably get tired of it before I finished a gallon.

A quart, maybe.

I was a bit nervous about class, because it was finally my turn to give the presentation at the beginning of the Script Structure class, one I worked on with my partner Ainslee (the Nova Scotian girl…. go Maritimes!), and while I don’t usually suffer from stage fright at all and I am great at public speaking, this was different. It was something where I was going to have to improvise a little, and that makes me nervous. After all, the presentation had only existed since last night, when Ainslee did the PowerPoint for it!

I did the writing.

But I needn’t have worried. Everything went fine. And it reminded me that I am a natural at that sort of thing. I would be so good at being an emcee for stuff. Or a game show host. I would rock that job.

Lately I have been pondering the question of fitting in. I want to fit in, I really do. But it’s not easy. I lack a lot of the deep social awareness, honed by years of social interaction with friends and such, that most people have by the time they leave elementary school.

As a result, I have grown into a very strange bird indeed. A lot of the circuitry that should have been dedicated to social development ended up getting used for other stuff, like all that abstract reasoning and creativity and deep thought I got going on, and those are the source of my powers.

And like any wizard, powers are all I have to offer the world. Without those, I am sort of pathetic.

So it’s a very complicated territory to navigate. Deep down, I want to be one of those people who can be totally at ease with anybody. That’s a noble goal, but probably not realistic, at least in the short and medium term. But it would be nice not to feel so awkward around people.

In order to achieve that, I think I would need lots and lots of experience with some fairly patient people who understand that a lot of what I say will be brain-crashingly strange to them and they will just have to wait for me to make sense again.

I need something like the social equivalent of a language immersion camp. Some place where I can get all the social exposure I need in order to spark that part of my brain that lets kids learn social skills at an early age, so I can acquire them on the deep native level that seems to be required.

I mean, I’m sensitive and somewhat charismatic, as well as witty and crazy freaking intelligent. Theoretically, I could be awesome. But first, I need to develop that little voice that tells me what will fit in people’s minds and what will not. Plus the willingness to listen to that voice and let it help me choose what to say more carefully.

There’s still a part of me that wants to say “Fuck you, I’m not dumbing what I say down for anyone! If they can’t handle it, that’s their problem!”

And that part of me will never totally go away. It will always stubbornly resist any sort of compromise to conformity and rebel against the notion of having to be like everyone else.

And there’s even a kind of admirable nobility to that kind of stance.

But I get so lonely sometimes.

And I want to come in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not even on break yet, and I am already bored and depressed about all the time I will have to fill.

I can’t spend it ALL playing Fallout 4!

So I will try to conceive of some kind of little thing I can work on in order to give my break some substance besides doing this blog every day. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing this blog. More than that, I need to do it. It’s a deeply ingrained habit now. The thought of going a day without blogging gives me a sort of dizzy nauseous feeling, like I have a high fever.

The kind that you can hear.

Speaking of deep seated psychological needs, I will be seeing my therapist for the first time since classes began on Thursday. Right now, AFAIK, the appointment is set for 2 pm, which will in all likelihood means that Joe will drop me off there but I will have to make my own way back.

That’s not a huge deal. At least, not as huge a deal as it used to be. Time was that having to walk four blocks to a bus stop was a major bummer for me. But I walk four blocks twice a day just to get from the Skytrain station to school and back. And those are Vancouver blocks, with an incline.

Nice flat Richmond blocks should be a piece of cake company to that!

I will also be going to the bank to cash my check and look into getting a loan to cover my remaining school debt. That’s going to be…. huge… for me psychologically. I can’t think of a situation which would be more stressful to me than talking to a bank manager or such and asking for money when I am just some schmuck on disability.

I would honestly be less nervous speaking in front of the UN. I am great at public speaking. It’s private speaking that scares the bejesus out of me.

But if I can do this, I can do anything. This is my Mount Everest. And I will climb it, and I will overcome it, and no mountain will be too high for me ever again.

Honestly, whether I actually get the loan or not after that is secondary.

Today I had Short Script in the morning. Which lead to another of my patented clusterfucks beforehand, because when I looked up my schedule online this morning, in those twilit hours between waking up and leaving for school, I saw that my first class was Short Script and concluded that this must mean that our final drafts of our short scripts was due today, which at the time meant I had 45 minutes to finalize it if I skipped breakfast AND didn’t pack a lunch.

So I was freaking out and trying to do all my planned edits at once and basically running around like the proverbial decapitated chicken until I finally looked at the actual assignment and realized it wasn’t due until a week from today.

D’oh! Oh well, no harm done. I still had time to eat a simple breakfast while watching some Voltron and get my ass to school only slightly late. For lunch, I put some Subway on my credit card, feeling kind of guilty about it as I will need all my $ to make that payment to VFS, but on the other hand, it was kind of necessary.

Oh, and speaking of which : I got a Roast Beef sub at Subway, and they have horseradish there now, so on a whim, I told them to put it on my sub. At the same time, I selected BBQ chips as my side dish. So I was basically eating two very spicy things. Which was dumb.

At least I had something truly marvelous to drink : watermelon juice! They actually had Tropicana Watermelon at Subway, something I had never seen before, and the moment I saw it while selecting my beverage, I knew I had to have it.

And it was quite lovely. I love watermelon so very, very much to begin with, and it also made for an excellent fire extinguisher for my poor burning mouth. The rest of me, not so much, but the mouth part of me got soothed anyhow.

The real problem was that I should have said “just a little horseradish” or had horseradish plus something cool, like tzatziki. I love horseradish with roast beef, but only in tiny amounts. Just enough to give it a bit of a kick to work against the heavy (and heavenly) savour flavour of the beef.

In the afternoon, we had Format class. Yay, I am finally done with Format! Our TV format test was, as promised, more of an Internet treasure hunt than anything else. I got 95 percent on it, which takes some of the sting out of the 59 percent I got on the other one. I am sure my grade will be decent in that class.

Oddly enough, I find that I am not thinking about grades at all right now. I am sure I will pass all my classes, and that’s all I really care about. Partly this is because, to be quite honest, the professors at VFS Writing don’t give you grades very often, so the numbers just don’t come up much. I have submitted a lot of stuff for which I have never, AFAIK, received a grade. Maybe all these things have, indeed, been graded, and the grades are sitting on Moodle somewhere and I have just never found them.

And I think that’s been good for me, to be honest. When I write something for school, I am not worried about the grade. I concentrate instead on making it good. As it should be.

Admittedly, I have never worried about marks much in the first place… I am, after all, Mister Take It For Granted That I Will Get An Eighty…. but still.

Art just feels more honest when there’s no numbers tying it down. And I feel like I am learning so much about writing from all this workshopping of both my stuff and other people’s.

And next term I get to take Sketch!

Things are looking pretty good from here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I am stuck doing another goddamned Hero’s Journey project. I can’t believe I had totally forgotten how hard I had found the first one. I was even the person who suggested that I do that part of our presentation. Now that seems like volunteering to test caskets “in the field”. What the hell was I thinking?

I mean… I actually said to my partner that I was looking forward to doing something besides the Seven Pillars of the good ol’ Three Act Structure for a change. D’OH! I am not well suited to taking a long and complex story and cramming it into an artificial structure. Doing it with the Seven Pillars is bad enough. But the Hero’s Journey monomyth has twelve steps and goddamn, not every movie fits it.

So tonight, I’m going to finally do my little spoof of the whole thing as a way of getting satirical revenge on the goddamned thing.

Oh, what Joseph Campbell hath wrought!

Anyhow, here it is :

Act 1. Ordinary World

Me : Here I am, relaxing and petting my pet wombat.

Act 2. Call to Adventure

Me : Oh no, someone stole my wombat! I must get him back!

Act 3. Refusal of the Call

Me : Oh, but I can’t go…. it’s Ficus Watering Night. And they look so thirsty!

Act 4. Visiting the Mentor

Me : Oh Great Wafflesnausage In The Sky! I pray to thee for guidance!
Booming Voice : Go to your wombat! This, I command!
Me : ..but what about my thirsty ficii?
Booming Voice : Look again, true believer, and see! FOR THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN WATERED!
Me : It’s a MIRACLE! Well, off I go, then!

Act 5. Crossing the First Threshold

Me : This is a perfect chance to FIRE UP MY NEW SMART CAR! Finally, the world of electric motoring will be mine to embrace!

Act 6 : Tests, Allies, Enemies

Test : THIS IS A TEST! Who played “Bull” Shannon on Night Court!
Me : Richard Moll, of course!
Test : CORRECT! You may pass.
Me : Oh good. Hey, who are you?
Ally : My name is Ally, and I am moved by your cause, for I too have lost a wombat! I will travel with you and help you find your wombat!
Me : Why, thank you! Now that just leaves…
Enemy : Grrr! I am Enemy, and it is I who took your wombat! If you want it back, you must face me in my own domain! Namely, my double wide trailer parked in the back yard of 1117 West Pender, just past the 7-11 with the burned out 7, so it’s now just a -11.
Me : I think I know the place. Across the street from the Piano Tuner’s museum?
Enemy : THAT IS THE PLACE!
Me : Right, then. I know the place. There’s a really good Dim Sum place near there.
Enemy : You mean Have Some Dim Sum, voted Vancouver’s Best in 1992, and that now features a twenty course meal made from fresh local ingredients and curated by the Food Network’s Rhonda Chow?
Me : No, the other one. Pender Dim Sum.
Enemy : They’re good too. Now where was I? Oh right…. FACE ME IF YOU DARE! MUA HA HA HA ETCETERA!

Act 7 : Approaching the Inner Cave

Me : Well there it is… the Double Wide of Doom! I must be cautious!

Act 8. Ordeal

Enemy : You fool! Now that I have you in my clutches I will show you no mercy! Now, SUFFER!
Me : Ow! Stop poking me with your garden gnome! It’s really pointy!

Act 9 : Getting the Reward

Me : Ah HA! At long last, I have been reunited with my wombat! But at what cost? Enemy has escaped and my wombat is DEAD!

Act 10 : The Road Back

Ally : Your wombat is only mostly dead!
Me : Then we must take it to the 24 Hour Wombat Hospital!

Act 11 : Resurrection

Wombat Doctor : Live, you magnificent rodent! CLEAR! *defibrillator zap*
Me : It worked! My wombat is ALIVE!

Act 12 : Returning with the Elixir

Wombat Doctor : Thanks to you, we now know defibrillators work on wombats!
Me : Aaaaand…. scene! *elaborate bow*

Well that was fun. Now that I have gotten that out of my system, maybe I can relax and focus on the task at hand without feeling overwhelmed.

What I am going to do is go through the script for The Incredibles and use it to create a very basic plot outline/beat sheet for the movie, and from there, I will hopefully be able to pick out the ones that fit the steps. Or that I can, at least, plausibly argue fit the steps.

It’s a great movie and it feels wrong to force it into some formulaic straitjacket. My natural resistance to what I consider to be an artificial structuring device kicks in and I want to just throw my hands up in disgust and refuse to do it.

Not an option, obviously. Even if I didn’t care about my own VFS career (and I do, very much so), I couldn’t do that to my partner. But that’s my emotional impulse nevertheless.

Today was a little rough on the nerves, because I had to do my presentation for a different subject with the other Michael in my class, Class 52. And while I do not suffer from stage fright most of the time, the group that went before us was so good that it made me feel intensely self-conscious about ours and so I had a panic attack and for a few minutes there, really, really, really. did not want to do it.

But we did it anyhow, and now it’s done, and I can stop worrying. And once I get this Hero’s Journey shit done, I am done for the term.

Speaking of terms, we were given our schedule for next term today, and it looks awesome. I will be taking such things as TV Spec (writing a spec script for Brooklyn 99 or Bob’s Burgers… keen gear!), Writing for Animation (something I would love to do… it’s an elective but I will probably take it anyhow), and the ultimate course for me… Sketch.

Yup, I am going to get to write sketches and call it schoolwork.

What a great gig!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.