So tonight’s work involves watching and analyzing The Incredibles. I’m halfway through it.

And you know, it’s really good. I had seen it once before, not that long after it came out in 2004, and I remember rating it on the positive side of meh. But the me of twelve years ago must have been looking for something it was never going to be, because the me of now is quite spellbound.

Of course, it helps that it’s on a big TV screen with great color. That makes everything better. But mostly, I am far more hooked in to Bob’s (AKA Mister Incredible’s) journey. Somehow I can really identify with the struggle between what you are, by logic and reason and sensibility, supposed to be doing, and what your unique power is calling you to do. I don’t blame Bob for not being happy living a normal life when he knows that there are people out there suffering and dying that he could have saved if he just had the balls to tell the government to go to hell and go back to being a superhero.

For those who have not seen the movie, the plot goes basically like this : In a world with lots of superheroes and supervillains, a series of very expensive lawsuits against superheroes (but it’s the government who ends up paying for some reason) has caused the government to pass a law banning all superheroing forever.

Which is a bit of a plot hole, because one would think that with the superheroes gone, the supervillains would take over. I mean, supervillains already operate outside of the law and face a lot of prison time if caught doing what they do, so it’s not like they are going to care about yet another law they are breaking. And we all know that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with superpowers is a good guy with superpowers.

Yes, just like they say in the gun control debate. Only in this case, it’s actually true.

So either the world of The Incredibles is a world with superheroes and no supervillains (unlikely) or it really should be a dystopian future where supervillains run rampant and the whole world is a Somalia type anarchy ruled by warlords with superpowers.

But instead, the world is just like ours. Fast forward fifteen years and Bob has a horrible, humiliating job as the person who is supposed to be denying claims to people trying to actually get the money their evil insurance company owes them (those greedy bastards!), but he’s actually too softhearted and tells them how to use legal loopholes to get what they are legally owed. This really pisses off his tiny angry boss, voiced wonderfully by Wallace Shawn.

I will stop myself there before this becomes an entire plot synopsis instead of a blog entry. Suffice it to say he gets drawn back into superhero work, despite his ex-superheroine wife not wanting him to risk their “normal” lives with their two superpowered kids.

And I know what it’s like to know you are exceptional and that making it impossible for you to live a “normal” life. Admittedly, my superpowers are a lot more modest that nigh-invulnerability or having a super-stretchy body like a superhero. They have a lot more to do with being crazy smart and creative to boot.

Nevetheless, I have always identified with people who are too powerful on a personal level for their own good. I have known I was exceptionally bright since way before I ever went to school. I learned how to read when I wasn’t quite three years old, for crying out loud. And that made me stand out from the my fellow students and made it hard for me to relate to them, a problem I still have to this day.

But like I have said many a time before, I could have gone the traditional route of becoming an apple-polishing prig who embraced the usual brand of intellectual elitism, misanthropy, and arrogance that turns so many of the best and the brightest into Ayn Rand libertarians these days.

Thank goodness most of them grow up and get the fuck over it. Oh yeah, it’s your specialness that people hate, not your atrocious personality.

But something in me resisted that, and still does to this day. It just seems like such an ugly and isolating route. And I am, deep down in my soul, a humanist, and you can’t be a humanist and a misanthrope at the same time, no matter how hard people try to do it.

The statements “I hate people” and “I love humanity” are not logically compatible. Besides, isn’t blaming all of humanity for the actions of a few the theoretical maximum of prejudice and bigotry? There is no large subset of humanity than humanity itself. That’s not even a subset any more. That’s the set itself!

And these days, I am actually someplace where I can learn to use my superpowers to make a freaking living. I guess that makes VFS my equivalent of Xavier’s School For Gifted Youths, though I ain’t no youth any more, except in life experience.

Any way you look at it, though, writing for television is not a normal life. So I will have dodged that bullet. I could never have been happy with something that clipped my wings too much anyhow. I have thought how it would be nice to have a job as a cashier at a bookstore or the like. Some small job that is well within my skills at customer service that could get me a minimum wage income and give me something to do with my time.

But now I wonder if maybe I would have gotten restless in a job like that and either ended up self-sabotaging or taking up some very self-destructive habit to deal with how unhappy I was, like drugs or alcohol or high risk sex.

I’m too queer and too big of a duck to be happy in a cage. On land, I am awkward to the point of ridiculousness.

But let me soar…. and I am fucking majestic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And a short one, at that.

Just one more week until I have finished my first term of VFS. I must say, I am having fun. I still don’t care for lectures, but I am pretty sure they told us that all that theory stuff is taught in the first term and from then on, it’s practical hands on stuff.

I can’t wait. I want to write. I want to do things. I want to be part of the team that makes things happen. I am actually pissed off with myself for forgetting to sign up for this web series they are doing over in the Production campus next term where I would have had the opportunity to work with a director and such as a writer on set.

That’s exactly what I want to be doing. I am super eager to get into the game. Money isn’t important to me right now. What matters is getting to do my thang.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Money is very important right now because I will need $800 before the end of the month. And it’s freaking me out. Which, sadly, makes it hard for me to do anything about it. This is the problem with depression slash anxiety. Things that should goad you into action freeze you in place instead.

There’s something to be learned from that, I am sure. Something about depression’s deadly alchemy, turning fire to ice. And the total suppression of the id, and the feeling that you are just barely keeping the boat afloat and any change, no matter how slight, will capsize you and plunge you into the bone-chilling cold waters of your suppressed emotion.

Anyhow. Hopefully, I will get over the freaked out period soon enough to save my sorry ass. It remains to be seen if the deer can snap out of its headlight hypnosis in time to avoid the oncoming truck.

This morning’s class was Short Script. I somehow missed that I was supposed to print out the second draft of my script so I could present it today. So I had to do that when we took our break. But that’s not the bad part, although I stupidly did my collating in the copy room on our floor and thus encountered one of the only bad things about being taller than average : counters.

Counters and sinks are, naturally enough, built for people of average height, and that means that my 6’1″ self has to kinda scrunch down to use them. And that hurts my back. We tall folk are prone to back problems anyhow (because we exceed the design specs for the human body) and scrunching down sure as hell doesn’t help. But it’s not too bad with sinks because I am usually only using them for as long as it takes to wash my hands.

Trying to do something like collating and stapling, on the other hand, was agony. Like someone was jabbing me in the back with a wire coat hanger.

The real bad part, though, was that because I didn’t have my stuff printed, the prof made me present last, and that means that I only got 20 minutes of workshop time when everyone else got at least thirty and the first two people got 45 minutes each. If the prof had just done her job and stopped the first two when she should have, I wouldn’t have gotten screwed over.

And that activates both the “control freak/incompetence” and “neglected/abandoned” issues, and that ain’t fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I got lots of highly useful feedback that will make the third and final draft way, way better. So it’s not like I got completely screwed over (although I would not have been surprised). It’s more of an abstract thing. But… ya know… ISSUES.

Tried the Mediterranean place a few doors down from the school today. Well, technically, it was the second time, but the first time I just got pita and hummus, so that doesn’t count. Today I got the beef lamb platter, and low and behold, it came with meat that sort of tasted like beef and sort of like lamb. Whatever. It was tasty, and came with rice, Greek salad (basically just pieces of cucumber and green pepper), and tabouli, which I’d never had but was quite nice.

Plus some pita bread and a little plastic tub of hummus, which I ended up not eating.

The afternoon class was Format, and we had a quiz. Oh joy. A quiz in my least favorite subject. I did a little quick studying before the quiz, and I was sure I would do okay on it. But when we graded our own quizzes later in the class (neat trick, teach!), I only got 60 percent.

And I was really disappointed in myself, because I knew that I hadn’t really taken the test seriously and that I probably could have gotten a higher score if I had just concentrated and applied myself.

Now the quiz is only ten percent of my final mark, so the stakes are not that high. At most, I cost myself two percentage points. But I am not the sort of person who gets 59 percent on anything, smarty pants that I am, and so that 59 percent was a real slap in the face.

Plus I am pissed off that the teacher never got to read my hilarious wrong answers. Hey, if you can’t be right, be funny!

Oh well. After this term, I will hopefully be bidding that subject goodbye forever. No offense to my teacher, who’s great and possibly the most energetic person I have ever met, but the course has been very dull and fussy and I really don’t enjoy it.

I have one more class in it, and it will be taking a test on TV script format, which will be open book/computer and more of an Internet treasure hunt than a test. Suits me fine!

You can’t really teach TV script format anyway because there is no universally accepted standard like there is for film. Every show does it differently. This also suits me fine, because it means when I am writing for TV, I will not have to follow some arcane set of rules.

I will learn the house style, and that will be it.

Well, that’s my day. Next week is the Nexus of All Deadlines, so I have lots of work to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Depression sure as hell doesn’t waste any time.

I had one and a half days out of school, due to illness, and in that short time, I reverted to my pre-Kwantlen state, where all I wanted to do was sleep and play videos and get through the day like that. When it was time to head out to my afternoon class, I really really didn’t feel like going. The whole school thing seemed like so much work and stress and hassle. It would have been so easy to just go back to sleep and let the whole thing crash.

And then I would be free!

That is seriously how depression thinks. Like I have said before, a long time ago, the key mechanism of depression/anxiety is the desire to escape situations at any cost.

That’s how depression uses anxiety to protect itself from interference by the forces of healing and sanity. It ramps up the stress of a situation until all you can think about is escaping that stress and fear, and therefore makes you willing to pay any cost to escape it.

Such suddenly acceptable costs include losing a job, wrecking your career prospects, alienating your children, sabotaging a relationship, failing your friends when they need you the most, and in the worst scenario, your continued existence.

Panicking animals don’t care about the long term effects – after all, you have to live through today in order to get to tomorrow. Hence the poor animal gnawing off a limb to escape a trap. Or the old myth that horses would run back inside the barn during a fire. When that adrenal response is going, the mind becomes very narrowly focused on what is happens right now at this very second, and the animal will do things that in a normal state it would never dream of doing.

And that works well for animals in the wild. But we human beings, the monkeys with computers, live in civilization and that means a lot of the threats and stresses have nothing to do with an immediate enemy – or prey for that matter – but things far deeper and more complex than evolution, which gave us these big brains in the first place, could ever have prepared us for.

There just hasn’t been enough time.

So when we panic, we get stupid. And in a terrible sense, that works out in the short term. The sense of relief you get when you have escaped the situation is a powerful reward, almost narcotic in intensity, and it reinforces the behaviour no matter what the rational mind thinks of the solution once it comes back online.

No wonder conservatives love being scared and/or angry. It turns their thinky parts off so they can revert into the bovine contentment they crave.

Talk about positive reinforcement!

I’ve been reading Vonnegut lately, and I just realized that it’s from him that I got the whole big paragraph/short sentence thing. Well, inspiration steals.

Of course, I am wise to the ways of depression now, so I know that the harder my depression fights doing something, the more important it is for me to do it. It’s the only way to take back control of you life and your ability to decide what to do with it. You have to prove, over and over again, that depression doesn’t call the shots any more. You have to do what it most dislikes.

You have to embrace life, which is the opposite of the deathly chill of depression. You have to overcome fear, which is the main enforcement mechanism of depression. You have to be willing to feel the negative emotions depression keeps sealed away in its icy vaults, and thus take away the very things from which it draws its wintry power. Less frozen pain makes for a less frozen you.

But you have to be ready to give up your depression. That’s a lot harder than it sounds. One of the major steps along the way is that you have to admit to yourself that your depression serves a purpose : it shields you from reality. To give it up is to drop your shield and face reality directly. It means coming to grips with all the things you have been avoiding for so long.

It might even involve growing up.

Unless you are ready to take that journey, you will forever be “stuck” with depression, because you will cling to it as a security blanket even as you try to eliminate it. You will end up doing something depression loves, namely going through the motions in order to seem to be “trying” while deep down you know you are just bullshitting yourself and you didn’t really try at all.

It was all pantomime.

Real trying means putting more than the absolute minimum amount of thought and effort into it. Really trying means you invest in the outcome instead of just assuming it will fail from the getgo and therefore not investing one erg of energy over the minimum.

Real trying is a threat to depression. So it discourages it with anxiety and ennui. So much easier to just give in to depression’s gravity and fall apart. Which is why another thing you need to do in order to break depression’s hold is to repeat this mantra as many times as it takes before you believe it :

Easier isn’t always better. It’s just easier.

Maybe I should write an article called “Six Harsh Truths That Will Free You From Depression”. Submit it to Cracked.com and see if they bite. After all, that other Six Harsh Truths article is their most viewed article of all time. And the way it pissed off so many people was, I think, extremely good for society in general because it forced them to confront their assumptions and question their bullshit.

I would love to have that kind of effect on public discourse. That’s the trickster’s job, after all : to make people examine what they believe.

We tricksters, if we are wise, know that very few people are going to thank us for that. People don’t like being taken out of their comfort zones.

But those comfort zones can get so small they cut off your oxygen. When they are challenged, they grow. When they grow, you grow. Stronger, healthier, happier people result.

And you’re welcome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up feeling terrible today.

My head hurt. Every major muscle ached. And my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a tornado… and it was mad.

So I emailed my prof saying I wasn’t going to be able to make it to class. That wasn’t an easy decision to make. I had to make the hard decision as to whether or not I was actually sick or whether this was just a heavier dose of how crappy I usually feel in the morning.

And I am still not one hundred percent sure I made the right call. Because somewhere between 2 pm and 3 pm, the symptoms just…. disappeared. All at once. Like a fog evaporating. One second I was hunched over at this computer, miserable, and the next, I felt fine. Great, even, thanks to the endorphins.

So I have to ask myself, WTF was that? Assuming that the problem was of a microbial nature, did my immune system score a sudden and decisive victory? Possibly. Was it just a matter of being upright and doing things for long enough to shake off the morning blahs? I hope not, because I hate missing school, and that would mean I could have gone.

I just don’t know. But I do know one thing :

Being home sucks.

It doesn’t take long with me for free time to turn into depression. My hold on a sense of purpose and focus is, as yet, quite slender, and all it takes is one solid day off to remind me of that. Up till now, I have been looking forward to having a whole bunch of free time at the end of the term. But today was a harsh reality lesson.

I probably won’t enjoy that time at all.

I mean, I won’t even have homework left to do. When I get bored of playing Fallout 4 (or FO4, as it’s known to people in a big hurry) later tonight, I can just bring up my little student calendar and see what is next on my assignment list, and do that.

I won’t have that luxury during the inter-term period.

So it comes back to that old issue of being self-motivating again. Dammit. I have really enjoyed having school to keep me moving forward and give me a sense of purpose. Having like, five days in a row sans school will cut me off for that for a short time.

All sails, no wind.

And speaking of school, June 30th is coming up frightfully soon and I still don’t know where I am going to get the $800 for the payment due to VFS by then. I have 15 days to come up with it, and so far all I have done to get it is an abortive attempt to apply for a loan to my bank.

I might end up having to ask Joe. But that will be my very last resort. He already does so much for me. I don’t want to burden him further.

But if I have to, I will. Otherwise this little experiment in my being treated like I might be worth something will come to a screeching halt, and that would damned near kill me. Or make me kill myself.

That is, after all, how depression kills people.

I should see what I could get for my old computer. Not much, I would imagine, but anything would help. My income doesn’t exactly allow for saving up money, alas. Otherwise I would at least have something to show for my time.

I think I have around $150 left in the Education Fund on my credit card. So I suppose, in reality, I am looking for $650. But that doesn’t offer much comfort. Anywhere I can get $650, I could probably get $800. That $150 seems unlikely to be a dealbreaker… or maker.

That assumes I am unable to get the money from my bank in the form of a loan or some sort. Realistically speaking, I can’t imagine I seem like a good risk for a loan, given my terrible credit rating and three figure monthly income. If they do lend me the dough, it will be out of pity, not sound financial reasoning.

I guess I could apply for some credit cards – the real kind, not the kind I have now – and put it on there. Credit card companies are known for their love of taking advantage of college students and their lack of long term thinking. I would qualify for something like that if they ignore my age.

Anyhow, I will have to come up with it somehow. The alternative is annihilation.

Other than the interim period, I am looking forward to having the first of six terms under my belt. Right now, the people a term ahead of us in term 2 seem so much cooler than us because they are not walking out all green in the stick and wet behind the ears. And I am looking forward to that.

As of the start of term 2, we will no longer be newbs! w00t!

Plus, like I said before, I am looking forward to greater challenge. Other than a few spots where I fell behind and felt overwhelmed, nothing I have done so far has been terribly difficult, apart from that damned format class business. Hopefully I won’t have to do all that again.

I want to write, not worry about stupid little details. I admit it, I am averse to fine detail thinking like that. I feel like the important thing is to get your point across, and if someone can’t process your brilliant idea because you made some small mistake that doesn’t really affect anything, that’s their problem, not mine.

So if, in the future, I make some sort of mistake that Final Draft doesn’t catch, and neither do I, I will just have to hope that whoever is reading the thing is not one of those “error encountered, processing shut down” people.

I am not the sort of person who can ever get things 100 percent right. 90 percent, sure. Maybe even more.

But never 100 percent. Sorry coach…. I only gave 93 percent out there. But hey… we still won, so who cares?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve realized recently that I actually use anxiety, and to a lesser extent compulsion, to get through my day.

It’s a simple mechanism. When there is something I need to do, I become anxious about it and worried that I will forget to do it, and I can only relieve that anxiety and worry by doing the damned thing. It’s like I have harnessed the basic mechanism of harmful anxiety and turned it into an asset.

It still seems to me to be a rather crude solution, but at least it’s a solution. I would rather be doing things from a place of joy and contentment and overflowing bonhomie, but that kind of shit isn’t always around for me to work with, and so most of the time, I need to rely on something I always have, which is, of course, anxiety.

Ain’t life grand?

Today started out rough. Getting out of bed was hard. I was so sleepy that I actually contemplated calling (well, emailing) in sick so I could catch up on sleep. And given how crappy I felt… it would lot have been wrong, though no doctor would have diagnosed me as ill.

And so I took the usual trip to school in a black fog. I did my breathing exercises, the ones I do to help my blood oxygen recover from my sleep apnea, but that only helped a little. And it didn’t help at all that I didn’t take my jacket and it turned out to be a ridiculously cold and miserable day.

I mean, I was cold coming home. At 4 pm. IN JUNE. Waddy fug?

And the first hour of my first class was miserable too. I was all sleepy and ill feeling. All the positive self-talk about how I would feel better once I got to school was beginning to seem rather hollow. I was not a happy little student.

But then something happened, and suddenly I felt a lot better. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I finally reached a healthy blood oxygen level. Maybe I had to get so much water in me before my body could shed some toxins. Maybe my guardian angel finally got to work after dealing with heavy traffic on the astral plane. I don’t know.

Sure wish I could do it on purpose, though.

For lunch, I got some pretty decent spaghetti from The Warehouse, the “everything is $4.95” place. I was a little miffed when I got to the writer’s lounge and found they had given me a spoon instead of a fork to eat my spaghetti, but luckily, the kitchen on our floor has cutlery and I was able to eat it like a human being.

One interesting detail, though. I got charged a buck extra for having it be a takeout order. This further cements my theory that the food is just there to get you to stay and drink. That extra buck is like them saying “Well, we’re obviously not going to be selling you any liquor, so YOINK!”.

And then I get up to the lounge and there are zero conversations going. The whole idea of getting it as takeout was so I could go up to the lounge and be social, and instead, everyone was wrapped up in their own little worlds and I ended up reading while eating instead.

I feel like, on some level, that was still better than eating alone in the restaurant, but I am having trouble making myself believe it. I am so conversation oriented!

Eventually, I did get talking to a classmate about Fallout 4, and that was cool. Yay, relating!

The afternoon class was TV Genre, and we did Drama. I got sleepy in parts and restless in other parts. But I enjoyed myself nonetheless. Rick is a great teacher, very funny and interesting. It’s just that part of me just plain does not want to be sitting still and listening.

Hopefully next term will include more hand-on workshopping type stuff to keep me occupied. I came here to write, dammit!

The morning class was our first taste of Feature Development, reminding us that we are going to have to write an entire feature film before we are done. That still scares me. But they are teaching us excellent ways to break the whole thing down into smaller and smaller pieces, so it’s not so intimidating.

I don’t know if I will use them, though. I am still having trouble accepting external structure into my creative process. I really don’t want to follow any kind of formula or method. The story is the story, and odds are, it will come to me as a whole, with the seed of the story being a specific idea and then everything else crystallizing out from that like a snowflake.

That’s how a lot of my stories have been born. And I don’t feel like taking that delicate snowflake and forcing it into some artificial structure that will take the vital force out of it. Real art lives and breathes. Everything else is just so much cold dead artifice.

Then again, I’ve never written an entire feature film before. So I might need the help. The closest thing I’ve written is my novels, and I didn’t plan those out in advance at all. Totally flew by the seat of my pants. I had an intuitive sense of the story so farand where I wanted it to go next, and that was it.

I get the feeling you can’t do a screenplay that way. It’s got too many moving parts.

Maybe I will “cheat” by making it so funny that nobody will care if it’s a structural masterpiece or not. I mean…. who watches comedies for the plot, anyway? And I am probably just overcomplicating things in my mind anyhow. I will be fine. I’m smart, I’m talented, and I can handle it.

And besides, I don’t want to become yet another person pitching a screenplay in Hollywood. I want to be a staff writer on a TV show.

So if my feature script ends up being only meh, so what?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking a lot about how to be today.

I am trying to find the door into reversing some of the social damage that has kept me back for all these fucking years. I want to heal and learn to be a part of things so I no longer feel like I am inherently excluded from everything. I am not sure what that would entail, so all I can do is feel my way to a solution.

And that takes time.

I am trying to be more social at school. But I don’t really know how. So I still feel like I am not truly welcome. It really seems like people would rather not be dealing with me. I feel like I am being obnoxious but I am too sweet and mild for anyone to get super pissed at me.

The thing is, I don’t know how to get into the conversation. Maybe I should just sit there and say nothing until someone talks to me, I dunno. I have trouble imagining that working. I am pretty sure that would result in me feeling more isolated than ever. Then I would have to leave… I can’t endure that. Being alone in a crowd is infinitely worse than just being alone, at least for me.

You can never be excluded and unworthy when you are alone.

But that still might be better overall than what I do now, which is staple myself into other people’s conversations. Just kinda barge in. And that’s definitely obnoxious bordering on rude. But at least it allows me to feel included like a real human being for a little while.

Then they turn back to the person they were actually talking to, and I am once more alone, unliked, and adrift, untethered.

Trying to fit in at school makes me feel like I am trying to shove my enormous mental and physical shelves through too small a door by sheer force of will. The hope is that whatever shape I take after being thusly compressed will be able to fit in for good, and it will all be worth it.

But it’s also possible that it will never work and I will only end up hurting myself.

I think that the harsh truth I may have to face is that even in a room full of nerdy writing students, I am a freak who doesn’t fit in because what he says is just too far off the beam for people to understand. I keep getting that “I have no idea what to even do with that” look, and that really hurts. It makes me feel like an alien. Like I am so strange people just ignore me, like I have a permanent Somebody Else’s Problem field.

IQ is a factor. It’s lonely at the top of the percentiles. Well, near it, anyhow. High up enough that it’s hard for people to relate to me, and vice versa. My thoughts don’t fit in their minds. It’s gotten bad enough that I have been seriously wondering whether I would be better off just being a sarcastic egotistical prick.

At least then people would have to deal with me.

My professors seem okay with me, but that’s par for the course. I’ve always got on better with the teachers than my fellow students. Not that they are super fond of me either. As usual, they are sort of afraid of me, I assume because of the obvious intelligence thing. A student like me is unpredictable, a real X factor, and that makes them nervous. They are afraid I will ask them a question they can’t answer and end up making them look bad in front of the rest. Or that I will unwittingly threadjack discussions (or outright kill them) by saying something so “out there” that it crashes people’s brains. Maybe even makes them feel stupid for not being able to keep up with me.

And nobody likes people who make them feel stupid, no matter how unintentional it is.

So maybe I should just own it already.Yeah I’m the smartest guy in the room wherever I go. Yes, my thinking is light years ahead of yours. It doesn’t make me look down on you like you’re a lesser being, but I am tired of assuming failure to get over is always all my fault. Maybe I should just cop a massive attitude and force the world to deal with me.

Or, and this is incredibly sad, maybe the only way I can truly relate to people is by being in charge. And even then, I would not be truly relating to them on an equal level. Being in charge would just make me feel useful and involved. I wouldn’t be relating to people as equals and really connecting with them emotionally.

I could lead them. Organize them. Inspire them. Take them places they never dreamed they could go.

But be one of them? Never.

Maybe the real problem is my still-frozen heart. In that state, I just don’t have access to whatever deep vein of unconscious empathy allows other people to fit in and make friends. People sense that about me, and it makes me seem not just alien but cold and aloof as well. Detached. Distant. Depressing.

That’s certainly how I feel a lot of the time. Like a planet too distant from the warming rays of the sun.

I’d really like to get out of my box now, please. No I don’t have the key. Do you have a hacksaw?

Ironically, I am fairly sure I can pitch ideas and such quite well. If it’s my idea, I can sell it, and well, impressing people who are more powerful than I am has never been hard for me.

I am the kind of guy who could write the movie, sell the movie, makes the movie, fill the theaters for the movie, promote the hell out of the movie…. then fail the after party.

Maybe that’s how a lot of people end up in leadership positions… by being unable to relate to people in a normal way.

It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve grown so much in the last year.

Actually, it hasn’t even been a year yet. It’s only been nine months. Nine months! That’s how long it’s been since I started at Kwantlen last September. Nine months, and I am still not done being born.

I like to take my time.

Nine months. Three quarters of a year. And yet it feels like a lifetime ago.

Hell, it feels like ten.

I guess once I got my life going, I really got it going. I find it hard to identify with that weak and sleepy person who was so damned nervous and scared on his first day at Kwantlen. It’s not that I don’t remember being that guy… I do.

But it still seems like someone else. Someone with whom I only share a history. Heck, I have trouble identifying with the version of me that walked out of Kwantlen on my last day of class there.

VFS has been good for me in a lot of ways. I feel more grounded and purposeful than ever before. Like my life is going somewhere. And I am really enjoying my classes.

I’m still a loner, though. My “forcing myself to be more social” project is taking longer than expected. I feel like I am fitting in a little better when hanging out in the lounge during lunch. But it’s not like I’ve made new friends there.

I’ve made a bunch of highly pleasant acquaintances, though, and that’s better than I ever did at Kwantlen. VFS has both small class sizes for certain classes, and I have a stable group, Class WR52a, for all those classes. There’s eight or nine of us now ^[bye] and I know them all by name, and they know me. We have workshopped each other’s stuff, and talked about this n’ that, and every now and then they even laugh at my jokes.

Not that often, though, and I don’t blame them. I realize now that all these years with the same group of friends has made me soft. Comedy is so much easier with La Gang because they know me, they get me, and I have had years of practice on the same audience. Plus we have over a decade of shared references to draw from.

I don’t have that with my group. Doesn’t stop me from trying, though. Very little can. I know this because I have been trying to be funny my entire life, and for a lot of those years, I was not good at it at all. It was a behaviour with very little reward and very little chance of success. And yet, I just kept plugging.

What can I say… comedy is me.

And I take comfort in that compulsion. It’s good to know that there are some things which genuinely drive me. Depression can make it feel like I am entirely inert. A noble gas that doesn’t react to anything. Or at the very least, nothing that isn’t immediately hyper-rewarding.

You know…. like food.

Anyhoo, back to life progress. See, I’m getting better. I still wander off on tangents… but at least I remember to come back now!

Right now, I have a glorious feeling of unfolding. Blossoming. It’s slow – you’d need time lapse photography to see it in action – but it’s powerful and profound. Eventually, I will emerge fully into the sun and bloom for all the world to see.

And if that doesn’t happen to include being as socially integrated as I want to be, I can live with that.

I say that because I realized that putting pressure on myself to “fit in” or make social progress faster than I am can only lead to disaster. Trying to force things like that never works. What I truly need is the opposite of that – to just relax, be myself, and see where I naturally fit.

I am pretty sure that must be what normal, people do. Any striving to fit in they do is done by instinct for the most part. And because it operates on that level, it is much faster and more successful than anything our overheated intellectual imaginations can conceive.

Life isn’t chess. You don’t always get to think then move. That’s a very hard truth for me to grapple with, but grapple with it I must, because denying it makes life worse and I went it to be better.

I will always be a thinker, of course. That’s just my natural disposition. There’s thinkers and doers, and I’m the former. Doers sometimes think they don’t need us thinkers, with our boring need to stop and think instead of just getting things done, but we’re the ones who decide what needs to be done, and why.

With us, the doers would have nothing to do!

That said, whatever experience I can get dealing with life in realtime is appreciated. It’s never something I want to do, but it’s something I need to do if I am going to escape the ice prison I have trapped myself in. Coming back to life is never easy, and almost always comes with a lot of pain…. but then it’s done, and the pain subsides, and you are left with nothing but the new, expanded consciousness.

And suddenly, you are more alive and awake, and the question of whether it was worth it becomes laughingly trivial and small-minded.

That’s what recovery is like for me. Waking up. Like I have said before, it’s like rubbing your foot to ake it up after it has fallen asleep. Sure, the immediate result is a lot of pins-and-needles pain as the numbness leaves and blood returns to the affected areas, and a person without any sense of the future might feel that pain and immediately stop, and decide that it’s not worth it. They might even go around limping with a numb foot for the rest of their lives simply because they couldn’t bring themselves to endure the temporary pain needed to wake it up.

But once they do…. they will kick themselves with said foot for not having done it a long time ago.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For me, at least.

I was pondering my efforts to become less inhibited today. I know that I have a really big personality ready to burst forth and amaze the world, but lacking any true capacity for transcendence via transformation, it has to be this slow geological process that only seems transformational at the very end, when the volcano finally erupts and adds a layer of magma to the island.

Or in my case, removes one. This is most definitely a subtractive process.

One of my problems is that I am just too focused on results, or at least, the results I imagine are happening. I am too worried about whether something will “work” or not, like a true pragmatist, and that makes me far too focused on controlling outcomes. And there is only so much control anyone can exert in this world.

Less pragmatic people get, ironically, better results because they are capable of faith. Faith in themselves, faith in the world, faith that everything will be okay. They believe in themselves by default, and they resist change in their positive self-image. It takes significant evidence to get them to change that positive self regard. And that skepticism about negative ego input keeps their self worth stable, instead of the wild variance experienced by people like me.

I’m not talking narcissism here. That would be the equal and opposite error to what I have. I am simply talking about a positive self-image that is a priori to any need for additional evidence.

Those of us with unstable self-worth are the ones who end up needing constant reassurance and validation in order to keep their ego afloat. Positive self-worth has a very short half-life in people like me, and that’s why we end up in careers in the entertainment industry.

If we didn’t hate ourselves, we’d be happy with a normal life.

So ironically, in order to meet my outrageous ego needs, I need to be more confident in myself…. which is the problem I am trying to solve in the first place. Just goes to show that seeking validation outside yourself can only take you so far. You have to be willing to give yourself credit before you’ve earned it, kind of like using your credit card to buy higher self-esteem.

Richer people do that with shopping, I suppose. I can’t afford such shallowness! Sigh.

I suppose it’s this need for external validation that give people something to prove. We might tell ourselves we’re out to prove ourselves to the world, and that’s true as far as it goes. But the real deep truth is that we are looking to prove ourselves to ourselves. To generate the evidence we need before we can give ourselves permission to accept ourselves as valid and worthy.

But if you don’t already believe in yourself, where are you going to get the energy and drive to go out there and get that evidence?

But I am beginning to repeat myself. Moving on now.

Today was an average day in school. Got my first draft of my short film script evaluated for formatting. I have a bunch of adjustments to make, but they are mostly minor. For the most part, it’s fine. And the prof gave me a 90 percent on it. So, that’s pretty good.

One of the benefits of tending to write mostly in conversations, I guess. I am a talky writer. I am going to work on that, though. Not so much in the sense of reducing the verbosity (although I will be doing that too) but in adding more visual content. I don’t naturally think in terms of the visual, but that’s going to be kind of important if you want to write for television, a visual medium. You can probably get away with more non-visual thinking in TV than in film, but I am still going to need to learn to describe things so that the people in other departments know WTF I’m on about.

Anyhow, here’s a link to a PDF of the latest version of my short script, entitled Waking the Demon.

Waking the Demon

As you can see, it’s basically a skit. And it takes the form of a long conversation between two characters. Looking back on my novels and short stories, a lot of them are mostly conversations as well. I don’t consider that to be a damning problem because a lot of great writers have written that way as well. You just don’t notice because a lot is going on in those conversations. It’s not just idle chatter or abstruse philosophical ramblings or whatever. Plot, exposition, character, and even setting can all be conveyed in conversations.

But people still need something to look at!

Right now, the thing could be done as a one act play. Costume and makeup might be a bit tricky, but still. So part of creating my second draft (due Wednesday) will be to add more action. As my prof said today, what are the characters doing while they have this conversation? Surely they are not just standing there stock still while they converse.

So basically, I have to give the actors some business. At the very least, it will make the whole thing read better because it will break up the blocks of conversation. And the actors are free to completely ignore anything I put in there.

I should put that in writing somehow.

So yeah. Add action, try to condense the dialogue, murder some darlings. I was wondering what to do to truly make it a second draft, and having the verbosity of the script mentioned was just the nudge I needed to get me over the cognitive threshold so I could see what needed to be done.

Sometimes, all you need is someone to break things down into smaller pieces for you.

I hope you find the skit slash short film funny. That was the idea. And I feel like it’s very “me” to have given it a happy feel-good ending.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.