Some of you already knows about this, so bear with me.

Last week, in Pitch class, we were given the following assignment : give a pitch knowing the person you are pitching to will not like it.

Now I took this to mean that the person would hate it, and so I figured, if I know they will hate it, why not pitch the worst movies I can think of? That way, I won’t care if they are hated!

Thus emboldened, I wrote the following :

<--->

1. It’s called Fartington High, it’s a high concept comedy, and it’s about a special high school for teens who suffer from extreme flatulence…. but that doesn’t mean they don’t like to get stoned! Join our hero, Bobby Bongripper, as he pursues the heart of his one true love, Susie Stonemaker, and leads the school to victory in the annual Bongfart Regatta against their hated rivals, the upper class jocks from the Whizzledown School for Bedwetters, and save their favourite pot dispensary/bean burrito shop!

2. It’s called Self Made Man, it’s a libertarian drama, and it’s about the world’s must handsome, brilliant, and sexually potent man, Prometheus Adonis, and his fight against the forces of compassion and taxes as personified by a gay, Jewish, handicapped, refugee IRS agent named Ira Grabowitz, who brings the heavy hand of government down on Prometheus’ company just because it makes a billion trillion dollars a year without paying ANY taxes!

3. It’s called Everything Explodes At The Same Time, it’s an action thriller, and it’s about a group of giant exploding robots called the Kaboomatrons who fight the evil Neversplode robots in a series of highly visual locations inexplicably filled with giant barrels of TNT and gasoline tanker trucks until the climactic final scene where…. wait for it… Everything Explodes At The Same Time!

4, It’s called The Royal Imperiatum Thrift Shoppe, and it’s about a shy, uptight, timid boy named Timmy Forestville whose life is drab and boring and, worst of all, normal until he happens to wander into the magical Royal Imperiatum Gift Shoppe and meets the owner, an idealistic free-spirited eccentric girl named Elfina Splendoriffic who takes him on a serious of magical journeys via a big brass steam locomotive to the quirky but extremely authentic locations where she gets the items she sells in her store. Unfortunately, during one of these trips, Bobby accidentally angers the Big Boar Jwah, who chases them throughout the magical realms because he wants to punish them by making them go back to the real world and work in a chain restaurant with uniforms. This all leads to a feel-great climactic scene where they finally have an earnest, heart to heart talk with the Big Boar Jwah and find out that he’s only so mean because he really just wants to be loved and accepted for who he is. It ends with a big group hug, and all three of them return to Earth, where they live in Bobby’s parents’ basement and start their own artisanal knitted condom business and live happily ever after.

<--->

Pretty funny stuff, I thought. I had dreams of amazing and amusing my classmates and my prof with my fantabulous comedy skills.

Alas, this did not work out.

You see, it turns out that the real nature of the assignment was to defend your pitch against someone playing the role of a crazy producer who was going to ask random stupid questions and try to get you off balance and test your ability to think on your feet. That would be the true Hell Pitch experience, so in a sense, we will have already been through the worst in a safe environment.

So after bravely delivering the Fartington High pitch to a chorus of full stares and cricket noises, I gave up on the rest.

Today was a decent day at school. The morning was… rough. I either slept through my alarm or turned it off without waking up (a disturbing thought), resulting in my waking up at 8:07 am.

And I normally leave at 8 am!

From there it was a mad dash to get my ass out the door. No chance to pack a lunch and breakfast was a banana and two granola bars eaten on the way to the Skytrain.

A sidenote : I am pleased to note that the two blocks of Cook Street between this apartment and 3 Road are replete with trash cans into which I threw my banana peel and granola bar wrappers. I heavily associate the presence of public trash cans with civilization. I have ever since I saw the streets full of fucking garbage outside the famous Graumann’s theater in Hollywood. So I take great comfort in knowing that little stretch is, by my standards, very civilized.

Where was I? Oh right. So I made it to school at 9:07 am – exactly one hour after I woke up.

Apparently, I got this shit down to a science.

First class was… mixed. I was very sleepy through the first hour, and that’s always horrible. In a way, I wish I was capable of just falling asleep in class like some people do^[snr], but my metaconscious is too strong for that. I could never be so innocently unaware. Instead, I go through a continuous cycle of sliding towards sleep then jerking myself awake which makes me completely miserable.

It’s basically the worst kind of being at school. If that never happened, school would be way easier.

On the other hand, I got to present my Story assignment, which went like this :

<--->

Who’s your character (define their personality, strengths and flaws) and what’s the world of the story?

Lisa Brauer, a highly idealistic young recent college graduate who just got a job as a social worker working in the Downtown East Side and is determined to make a difference. She’s extremely bright and very passionate and sensitive. But she’s had a very sheltered life and has no idea what she is really getting into./

What’s what the problem/issue for your protagonist?

Her external problem is that she has gotten herself stranded in the DTES in those hours between when the buses and trains stop running and when they start again. She doesn’t have enough money for a cab, and she lives in Surrey, so walking is not exactly an option. So she has to survive four hours in the middle of the night in the DTES.

Her internal problem is that she has no idea how many middle class prejudices she holds, and how little she truly understands about the people she wants to “save”.

What’s the solution to the problem /issue?

The external solution comes in the form of a street youth who calls himself Skeeze. He appoints himself her guardian, and sees her through the night.

The internal solution also comes from Skeeze. Through talking with him and letting him take her on a little tour of the DTES, she comes to truly understand that some people have lives so completely different from her own upbringing

What’s the outcome?

She makes it home safely, and acquires a much deeper understanding and empathy for the people she has come here to serve.

How has your character changed?

She has had a lot of her illusions shattered and has gained a lot of wisdom, humility, and insight. She’s less idealistic but more determined than ever to do her job and do it well.

<--->

As with the similar exercise I did for Character class, I loved every minute of workshopping my ideas. I know other people don’t enjoy it as much, but I absolutely love having a group of highly intelligent and creative people helping me flesh out my ideas and work out the plot.

Remember, there’s story and plot. Plot is the means by which one tells one’s story.

I love it, because to me, it’s like getting to use other people’s minds in addition to my own. That’s an amazing feeling to me. It means I get to use other people’s perspectives to spot what I cannot, and that gives me a strange giddy feeling of both exhilaration and safety. It’s like the closest I have ever gotten to feeling the safety of the pack.

And yes, that it both crazy and sad. And crazy sad.

So that was awesome. If I ever write that story, I know where I would go with it. And if I did, it would most likely take the form of a short film or even a one act play. Not a lot of money in one act plays, but it could be a big hit, seeing as it only has two characters in one location (potentially) and is all about breaking down the barrier between the middle class and those less fortunate souls they automatically assume need to be rescued from the lives that must be as unhappy as we would be in their situation.

Check your privilege indeed.

For lunch, I used up the last 5 bucks I had on the Subway gift card Joe gave me for my birthday and got me an egg salad sub, some Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, and a Diet Pepsi.

Speaking of cheddar and chips, unsolicited plug time : Stacy’s Pita Chips have a new flavour, Toasted Cheddar, and it’s delicious. It tastes exactly like toasted cheddar, and that is super yum to me. I am already envisioning getting more the next time I shop!

Afternoon class was TV Genre, and today we did Westerns. Not a big fan, but I don’t hate them, and we got a rare treat : we got to watch an episode of Lonesome Dove that Rick wrote. For someone like me, that was a huge thrill. Being in the same room as the person who wrote the TV episode I am watching… that’s an almost religious experience for me.

I honestly wanted to ask Rick a zillion questions. But there wasn’t time.

Well, that’s it for tonight’s extra-wide edition of this blog. Hope you enjoy my stuff.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it has nothing to do with the temperature.

I am having some sort of reaction to something. Right now, I feel kind of numb from the knees down, and my whole nervous system feels hot. If it gets any more severe than that, I am calling 911. But it feels like it is slowly fading.

I did eat something new and unusual today. I tried that places where all the food is $4.95 that is a few doors away from 198 Homer where I go to school. It struck me as a bizarre but awesome business model until I actually went in, then suddenly the whole thing made sense.

It’s a bar. A place called The Warehouse. The food is their very smart way of getting people there and selling them liquor. Food service is modestly high margin in and of itself, but the real money, as always, is in liquor sales. ^[pop] So, sure, they will sell people a burger and fries for $4.50 and thus insure very heavy traffic. If most of those people buy at least one beer, the place is a goldmine.

And the food was decent. My turkey sandwich was pretty good, and it came on bread with cranberries in it, which makes sense (turkey and cranberry sauce go together well) but was weird. And that came with fries that were decent, but were listed as “peppered”.

They didn’t taste like pepper, though, so I ate them. And I think that was my mistake.

Because about twenty minutes after eating, I started feeling like I had deep-throated a blazing stick of Thermite. At first I was just annoyed that it was making me need to take a dump during lunchtime, which I prefer to spend in the lounge attempting to become a social human. But then, as I was sitting in class, I felt the burn intensify, and not 45 minutes after having to go the first time, I had to go again.

That’s not a good sign for someone who is an IBS sufferer like myself. It means something is irritating my irritable system and no good can come of that, because one of the cardinal rules of IBS is that things don’t get really bad until you’re empty.

Because you see, your bowels aren’t spasming in order to empty you out. That’s just a byproduct. It’s spasming because something has irritated it, and that doesn’t end once you have no more to expel.

Sure enough, I felt pretty ill during the rest of the class. ^[zzz] At first, it just seemed like the usual sort of turbulence that is part of the pattern of everyday life for us IBS sufferers. But eventually, I realizing that this sense of restless I was feeling was not just the usual restlessness of the bored student who wants to go home, but the result of the fact that my nerves were on fire and it was actively painful to sit still.

I also got these sharp stabbing pain on my right (your left) foot, which has been happening now and then lately and which I really need to stop ignoring. Because it could be peripheral neuropathy, and that is a nasty condition if left untreated. And it definitely seems neurological, given the was the sharp pain subsided into an “itchy pins and needles” feeling.

Anyhow, this got worse over time and really kept me awake on the Skytrain. The pepper angle occurred to me when I cleaned some gunk off an upper tooth with my tongue and under it was some pepper, which fell directly onto my tongue. I thought, “A ha! A possible suspect!”.

That is, a suspect in the case of the cranky lower intestine. I don’t know about the rest of it.

I hope it’s not that I have had a tiny heart attack or something like that. Or a neurological event of a negative variety. It’s kind of frustrating (though preferable) that the symptoms are so muddily minor. It could be something as simple as a punched nerve. Or it could be something going wrong in my brain. Who knows?

And as a recovering hypochondriac, I do not trust myself to make any sort of determination of my level of illness without clear, unmistakable, and/or severe symptoms. My mind will amplify minor symptoms into major panics if I let it, so I have tio keep that in mind at all times.

And while for normal people there are worse things than going to emergency for what turns out to be nothing, for a socially anxious dude like myself, there really isn’t. All it would take is one curt gesture, one frustrated sigh, or one disbelieving eyeroll and I would be utterly crushed.

Which, ironically, might qualify me for a Psych admission.

But I don’t want to end up on the Psych ward ever at all. I am terrified that I would never have the strength to leave again. I could easily convince doctors that I needed more treatment, and the ability to get the nurturing I crave while being safe from reality’s expectations might be mighty seductive.

So I am afraid that I would be the funniest guy in the psych ward for the rest of my life. And I got plans.

Which, sadly, involve finally doing that goddamned Format class assignment. That means I have to read a script for a half hour TV show, and one for an hour long TV show (both still on the air), and note all the ways the formatting is different between the two, and how it’s different from the standard movie format.

And that is exactly the kind of nitpicking petty detail work that I can’t stand.

Anyhow…. where was I… I guess I kinda lost my train of thought there…. well, all I am really trying to say is this :

I can’t eat fries from The Warehouse any more.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been decent.

In the morning, I had TV Viewing class. It’s where we watch a bunch of episodes of something that we might want to pitch to some day.

Today’s show was I, Zombie. It’s a show about a hyper-achieving medical resident who goes to a party on a boat one night and gets attacked by zombies. She wakes up the next morning a zombie herself, but not the sort that is all mindless. She’s still the same person, more or less, and in the show’s universe, she can only stay that way fi she keeps getting her brain fix.

So she gives up on being a cardiologist and instead goes to work at the morgue, where she can get a ready supply of grey matter. She discovers that when she eats someone’s brain, she gets some of their personality traits, skills, and memories, and she uses this ability to bring these people’s killers to justice, along with her cop friend (who thinks she’s psychic… which she is… sorta… ).

It’s an odd but fun premise, and I enjoyed the episodes we watched. It’s reasonably well written and kinda funny. I wouldn’t call it brilliant but I would definitely say it’s considerably above average. I especially liked the third episode, where she ate the brain of someone who turned out to be a sociopathic hitman obsessed with trivia contests. As a result, she did acquire mad trivia skills, but she also learned what it was like to be a sociopath and genuinely have no human emotion. To be completely selfish not by choice but because you’re fundamentally broken. She describes it as “like everyone is behind fifty feet of glass”.

I have somewhat of a fascination with sociopaths. To a very sensitive person like me, being a sociopath seems like a special kind of hell, and while it might be nice to get a break from all the empathic noise in my head from time to time, being cut off from all empathy would be far, far too steep a price to pay.

Still, the idea of an absence of moral feeling fascinates me. I am someone with a very deep sense of right and wrong, and I have pursued the understanding of ethics as a philosophical discipline ever since my first year of college. And that’s only my official start. I had been pondering the question of what is the right thing to do for a lot longer than that.

I just didn’t have a name for it.

They also fascinate me because they seem like the sort of people society should know about. It would be great if there was some sort of test, like the Voight-Kamph test from Blade Runner, that could be administered at a certain age that would flag people as sociopaths. Maybe something more sophisticated and fMRI based.

No idea what we would do with that information, though. That’s a tough nugget to chew. It seems horribly wrong to lock people up for failing some sort of test, even though that might be what’s best for society in terms of safety. Giving them some special set of rules to follow seems pretty heavy handed too. Modern society simply cannot tolerate creating any sort of special class of citizen that doesn’t have the same rights as everyone else.

The only exception is the criminal class. And to qualify for that, you kind of have to commit a crime. And being a sociopath can’t ever be a crime in and of itself. It honestly seems to me that knowing who the sociopaths are can only be used in retrospect.

“Well, Bob Henderson committed a heinous crime today.”
“*looks up Bob on the Sociopath Index* That figures. ”

Another thing that fascinates me is the fact that the majority of crime is committed by a small group of hardcore criminals. That makes it seem like a vast reduction in crime is tantalizingly possible. That’s why I support Dangerous Offender type legislation that allows for keeping some people locked up indefinitely because they pose a real risk to the community if released when their sentence is up, as long as it is very narrowly construed to only apply to people with a seriously nasty record replete with recidivism.

My support is not without reservation. Anything that violates the basic human ethic principal of fairness cannot be considered lightly. And it doesn’t seem fair to tell someone they will be going to jail for X number of years then change our minds and say “Psych! You’re never getting out. ”

But there are some people who just plain should not be allowed access to the public any more. It’s a very small number of people, thank goodness, but nevertheless, I think it’s justified in those cases to just keep them locked up indefinitely.

However, I also think that if we are keeping someone past their sentence, they should be transferred to a nicer sort of prison. After all, we don’t have to scare them into never committing a crime again… they are never going to have the opportunity. And we are tacitly admitting that these people can’t help themselves. I know that this would offend people’s sense of punitive justice, but that was taken care of by their original sentencing.

After that, we are just warehousing them. So why be harsher on them than we have to be? Like Bentham said, no law and no punishment can be allowed to be any more severe than that which will provide sufficient deterrent to crime. Anything more is tyranny.

That’s why I agree with Nietzsche (check out the philosophical name dropping on this one) when he says to mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong. It’s not that there is something wrong with just punishment. It’s that those kinds of people cannot be trusted to limit themselves to what is merely just. They tend to want to vent their frustrations on whoever gives them a pretense.

I hate people like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has been quite pleasant.

My morning class was Movie Theory, and that is always a highly enjoyable class that doesn’t seem like school at all. And then I had the afternoon off, so I came home, caught up on sleep, and played Fallout 4 a bunch. I also started the detailed outline I promised I would get to Other Michael, AKA Michael Deo, who is my partner in the big Movie Theory presentation that we will be doing two weeks from today, on the 20th of June.

I tried to work out some kind of rational division of labour with him, I really did. You do these parts, I do these parts. And for the most part, I succeeded. But just when I thought I had won the battle agaainst my usually hidden but extremely potent demon of control freakiness, I said “Tell you what, I will do the outline first. ”

And he agreed, because he’s very sweet, shy, and quiet. Sigh.

This is my cross to bear when it comes to collaboration. I am not used to working with others and compromising. My creative world has been my own personal playground for my entire life and the idea of having my name attached to something over which I did not have full control and final say makes enormous alarm bells go off in my head.

How can I make sure it’s good if I don’t have total and supreme control over it?

But I am going to have to get used to it, because television is written by writer’s rooms, not writers, for the most part. And so I am going to have to GTFOver myself and learn to play nice. I am going to learn to silence those crazy ass voices in my head and actually (drum roll please, plus some kappi maki and a bowel of miso) TRUST somebody to do a decent job all on their own.

I have a lot of excess wiring in my head when it comes to that whole control thang. Perhaps this need for control is the real motivator behind my tendency to “accidentally” end up in charge of stuff. Well, that and my need to constantly show off how damned smart I am… I really should work on that.

People know I’m smart. It is apparently obvious. Rationally speaking, I have nothing to prove. But I have such outrageous ego needs stemming from my massive insecurity.

It’s this whole thing.

A big word in my whole control issue complex is “competence”. Competence is a huge huge issue for me. Perhaps it’s a product of my ferociously pragmatic mindset (what’s with that, anyway?), but I get extremely angry at incompetence. I truly feel that people who can’t or won’t do their jobs properly should be fired so someone who can actually do what they are paid to do can take their place. Incompetent design, lazy thinking, and dullwitted behaviours by otherwise mentally competent people all outrage beyond their proper proportions. I can get really, really mad about it if I don’t control myself.

And of course, that feeds into the whole control freak thing perfectly. If I can’t trust others to be competent, what other choice do I have? Obviously, the only way to insure things are done “right” is to do them myself, or even better, control how others do it. That way I can perform the executive function without worrying about my own incompetencies.

This side of me has remained latent and hidden because I have done everything on my own. Whether in school or out, I did my own thing all alone, just like a prisoner in solitary. Having friends helped a lot, but still those deep thick planes of glass keep me trapped in my own little world all by myself.

And that’s how I maintained control as well. When you are all alone, you don’t have to share, compromise, negotiate, or otherwise deal with An Other. You can have things entirely your own way. I never intended to end up needing that kind of thing, but human beings are amazingly adaptable, and that’s the adaptation I made to my decades of loneliness. Maybe if I had experienced a more equal and involved relationship with my siblings, I would have learned the necessary social skills from them. Or if I had got on better at school.

But that didn’t happen in those crucial years where I should have been soaking up social programming like a sponge. I learned how to be polite and considerate, I even somehow acquired the ability to be sensitive and sympathetic – but only with that vital degree of separation between me and others. Politeness, after all, is not just how we get along with one another – it’s also a way to keep people at arm’s length. Consideration can do the same thing. And I am sensitive and sympathetic…. but not like a friend.

Like a shrink.

Even all my online furry roleplaying, in which I am an idealized version of myself (cute, open, friendly, funny, cuddly, etc) represents that arms-length relationship with the world because it’s just text. That keeps it safely unreal and so it happens mostly in the realm of my imagination, where I feel safe. Sure, other people are contributing just as much to the interaction, so it’s not like I am alone (that would be truly sad), but I can only be the person that I am online because I am safe inside my armor of another identity, one over which I created and over which I have total control.

So as much as I want to be truly leave my shell and be a part of the world… I honestly don’t know what that is like. I don’t think I have truly lived in the world since I was molested.

I still have all that thick but perfectly invisible glass that lets me pretend I am really here because hey… do you see anything between me and you?

But some day I won’t need it, and it will disappear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As is tomorrow.

After entering every bit of schoolwork I could glean from my class’ Moodle site into my little student calendar app, I now have a very convenient little list, sorted by due date, upon which to base my life. My plan is to do at least one item of schoolwork a day, seven days a week. Obviously, there will be times when I have to do more than that, and there will probably be times when I have to prioritize by other criteria, but the basic pattern has been formed and I intend to stick by it.

That means that today, of all days, is the most important one in creating this new habit, because I totally don’t have to do it. I’m good till Wednesday. I could totally slack off until Tuesday night and it wouldn’t change a thing, school-wise. And there’s a big part of me that wants to do just that, and revel in my oh so clever crapulence.

But that’s the Jagoff talking, and I intend to systematically and thoroughly cripple that motherfucker so he can’t mess up my life any more. There’s a lot of good parts of me that are attached to that side of me that I am going to keep – my bonhomie, my relaxed attitude towards life, my undeniable charm – but the slacker mentality has got to go.

Later isn’t better. It’s just later.

And if I stick to my one-a-day plan, I will stay way ahead of my schoolwork for the foreseeable future. I will have banished all the worry and stress about whether I am going to show up in class without my work done. Gone also will be stressing about deadlines because I will be way ahead of them. And I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I am an excellent student and totally on top of this whole one year intensive thing.

But I know it will not be easy. This sort of self-discipline is hard for me. And I no longer have an endless sea of boredom to keep me going. That’s the resource I tapped on in order to get this whole one thousand words a day thing going. I had zero going on in my life at the time, and writing my 1K a day gave me something to do that was productive. Something that meant something. Something that lasted long enough to be measured and kept.

That’s what turned it into a habit over time. My mind gradually learned that my thoughts and emotions had an outlet and didn’t have to circle endlessly in my head like a cow in a tornado. Or a plane endlessly circling the airport waiting for clearance to land. And once that fact was established not just in my thoughts but in my beliefs, it could gradually become a need.

I have talked recently about the possibility of having to skip a day’s blogging now and then if my schoolwork really piles up. Logically and sensibly speaking, it’s practically inevitable.

But when I think about it, I get this cold clutch of fear inside that makes me shrink away from the prospect like a mimosa. I really, really don’t want to go a day without blogging. It’s been the center post of my life for five or six years now and I can’t imagine going without it for even a day. The few times I have skipped a day or two because of a convention, I have felt it acutely. It’s made me feel guilty, unfulfilled, and kind of mentally congested/constipated. Like there’s something in me that just has to come out!

So I will avoid it as long as I can. I think I can keep it up for quite a long time (so to speak) by employing the “sometimes my blog entry is my schoolwork” method that I used occasionally when I was in Kwantlen. ^[wow] And the great part about that is said schoolwork should be a lot more interesting to read now that I am in VFS.

It might even be actual writing. You know, the creative kind. With a plot and characters and commas and shit.

So once I finish the day’s blogginization, I will rest for a bid, look up what is next on my list, and do it. Only after that is done will I give myself permission to slack off, play Fallout 4, and turn off my brain until I go out for dinner with La Gang.

I think this whole school thing will work out after all.

Hopefully, doing schoolwork every day will become a habit just like the blogging. I look forward to days when I have a craving to do some homework but there’s none to do. That seems like a good kind of unscratched itch. Granted, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon, as I have stuff for the rest of the month, but still.

As part of my research, I discovered that the last week of the term, Week 8 (this upcoming week is Week 6) will be pretty light. Only five classes… one on the Monday, two each on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday off.

That’s about as much time off between terms as I really need. I am sure that by the time Term 2 starts in July, I will be raring to go. I am looking forward to having more real writing to do. Right now, they are easing us into it, while making sure we know it’s going to get way more intense. And that’s cool and all.

But I came to VFS to work, dammit. I want to know what it is like when my creative energies are totally drained. no doubt it will be quite the trip, and kinda scary since I have been stopped up inside for so very long that I can’t imagine being any other way.

Can’t wait to find out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[wow]] That already seems like several lifetimes ago, and yet, it was less than two months ago! Amazing how time slows down when you put more in it. [[wow]

I have been revised my inner biography lately.

Not about specific things, like whether something happened literally or only figuratively, or whether a memory is “real”. I don’t worry toto much about that. I am quite good at separating reality from fantasy and the inside of my head from the real world.

I kind of have to be, what with all the input from my imagination and complex thoughts and such.

No, it’s more a reappraisal of my life story. Specifically, why I had such a lonely childhood. I usually blame my family, the bullying, the schools, and so on, and I don’t know, maybe that’s legit.

But mostly, it was the disease. Depression.

And that’s a very depressing thought.

Having people to blame offers a toxic kind of comfort. It verifies your own innocence in the matter (meaning you didn’t make a mistake) and gives you someone to vent your rage on, even if it’s only in your head. And there is power in casting yourself as the victim. Power you could use, in theory, for revenge.

And that way you don’t have to own your anger. It’s not your anger, it’s anger that was put into you by others, and you just want to give it back to them, with interest.

But that means keeping it, burning you up inside.

Sorry, didn’t mean to make this into an anti-revenge thing.

My point is that I constructed a narrative of my childhood that served a purpose – it closed the wounds, kept me innocent – but I think it’s time to abandon it and move on. I want that energy that I have all locked away back, as well as the bits of me that were locked up with it, and this blame cycle is keeping me from doing that.

And this isn’t about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a very worthy goal, but it’s hard. It means changing a very deep entry in your fundamental table of values to something dangerously close to the intolerable thought “it was okay for them to do this to me”, even though that’s not what forgiveness means at all, and that makes it the sort of thing you work towards without expectation of achieving it.

So forget forgiveness. This isn’t about that. What I am talking about is different : de-emphasizing the anger.

Declare it unimportant, or at least, low priority. You’re not saying you will never ever right the wrongs against you. You’re just saying that you have more important things to do, like getting on with your life and learning to live it, and that means minimizing the energy budget allotted for keeping that wound fresh and open.

Who knows…. you might even heal. Would that be so bad? If someone said “I will pay your rent for the rest of your life if you just lay that burden down (without abandoning it)”, you would go for it. Think of all the fun you could have with the money you save! Your budget would go so much further!

Well that’s the deal this kind of non-forgiveness offers. You don’t have to let go of your baggage… just put it down. It will be right there if you should ever want it again. Putting it down just means you won’t be carrying it around any more.

So I am hereby declaring that whatever has happened to me in the past – all my ills – are unimportant. Yeah, a lot of heartbreakingly fucked up shit has happened to me in my life, but it’s not like I am going to bring the perpetrators to justice any time soon, so fuck it. I’d rather be sane and whole and enjoying my life without depression dragging me down than to be eternally vigilant waiting for some kind of justice that is never going to happen.

So I was molested at The Spa when I was three or four years old. So what? It’s not like I know who did it (I’ve thought it was my Dad in the past, but now I dunno) and it’s not like I am going to find that person some day and beat the shit out of them. So fuck it.

So I was bullied in school. So what? It sucks, but it happens to like half the people in the world. They get through it. I’m not that person any more… so why carry him around? I am sick and tired of his shit anyways. So fuck it.

So nobody paid attention to me at home. So what? For one thing, that’s not even accurate. People did pay attention sometimes. And even if they hadn’t, I did not exactly solicit help with my problems, so how were they to know what was going on in my head? They were living their own lives with their own problems that were just as legit as mine. So fuck it.

So I always either had no friends or had friends that were likely to turn on me because I was such a whiny wimp. So what? I was an odd specimen. Expecting regular people who were not psychiatric professionals to be somehow able to “get” someone with the sort of brains and issues I had when they are kids too and just trying to get on with life is irrational. So fuck it.

Same with the teach and school admins who turned a blind eye to the bullying. Sure, they should have been there for me, but they were just regular people too, and I was quite the prickly package to handle, and I didn’t exactly insist upon myself. At least people know better now. So fuck it.

And the thing that ties it all together – the bullying, the lonely school life, the lonely home life, the educational neglect, all ties back to the same thing :

When I was sexually assaulted, a huge thick pane of glass descended in my mind to protect me from the world. And that glass has a name : depression. That’s what took my to my distant, lonely planet and cut me off from the warmth of the sun. That’s what made me so awkward in the world both physically and socially. That’s what made it so hard for anyone to reach me. That’s why I can’t just relax and enjoy life instead of always trying to control outcomes through hyper vigilance.

Depression is a debilitating disease. And I contracted it at a very early age.

And there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could have done about it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s Friday, I don’t really feel like talking about anything serious, so here’s some random stuff I am into now.

School. After my meltdown and/or burnout Wednesday night, I’m feeling MUCH better now.

I guess I just need the occasional emotional breakdown to go through me like a forest fire and clear out all the old dead growth so that new life has a place to grow. Now I am enjoying life and enjoying school. There will always be an impatient little kid in me who doesn’t want to be sitting there listening to things, especially in the summer, but now that we are workshopping more and attending lectures less, that’s much less of a problem.

And I am getting to do what I really want to do, which is write.

My short film script had its debut today. By that, I mean that today was the day it got a table read and some workshopping in class. I had to go last, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, I wasn’t tasked with maintaining interest in other people’s works after my presentation was done. It’s not that I am that selfish. I really want to help people with their stuff. But one of my main issues is concentration and focus (mainly, keeping this big brain of mine from wandering off on me), and knowing my time in the spotlight is coming up helps that a lot.

On the other hand, it was so much waiting. Plus, there is a part of me that always associates going last with being picked last, and that’s never a good feeling. In Pitch class, the way it works is that a person pitches, then picks the next person to pitch, and I am always picked last. I don’t know what the problem is. Perhaps I am putting out those mixed “pay attention to me/ ignore me” signals. Maybe I put out a weird vibe. Maybe I just don’t seem approachable or accessible.

And in a sense, I’m not, due to social maladjustment. But I am learning.

Fallout 4. Despite the game being “so last month” with all my online friends (dammit), it’s a fascinating game. At first, I wasn’t that impressed because it seemed like Bethesda had taken my favorite game franchise and reduced it to yet another FPS.

But that was before I found out what happens when you press Q. Suddenly, the action is in slo-mo and I get to pick which body part to target and it’s almost exactly like the dynamic I loved in 1 and 2. And I am back being the super badass motherfucker with incredible aim who takes down enemies with a single shot to the head.

The game even slows things down for a slo-mo replay of the kill. SPLUT. Take that, you motherfucking raiders! You live by force and fear, and I represent civilization, and it is therefore my sworn duty to put you on the right path…. by putting you in the grave.

Relax, folks… it’s just a video game. One I am enjoying the HECK out of.

And it has a huuuuge world. So when I get bored of doing missions, I can just go a-wandering and find neat stuff like a trading post (where I got to be the badass who protects an old mother and her junkie son from some scumbag drug dealers) or an old USAF satellite station (yay, more raiders to kill!) or an abandoned train.

SO all in all, a very good purchase. I imagine it will keep me busy for quite a long time. Schoolwork comes first, of course. But it’s a good secure feeling to know that when I have downtime, I have a highly enjoyable video game to play. I still kinda wish I had waited to see what the other critters were playing these days so I could actually be able to participate in the discussions, but what the hell, I am having a good time playing a good game at its maximum graphical capacity, so ya know, whatevs.

Books. I’ve talked her before about rediscovering my love of reading after finally breaking the grip my tablets had on me. Man, fuck looking at screens all the time. The games on the tablets were usually pretty lame anyhow, especially compared to actual legitimate PC games. And now that I am letting my eyes rest on pages instead of screens sometimes, I feel a lot better. I was overexciting my brain with those stupid tablet games, and worse, I was doing it right before trying to sleep.

No wonder I had a hard time getting to sleep!

Speaking of sleep, my alarm either didn’t go off or I slept through it this morning. So I woke up at 7:36 am instead of 7:00 am, and that meant I barely had time to eat before I had to be out the door, and that meant I had no time to make a lunch.

That has been happening all week. One thing or another keeps preventing me from packing a lunch. Of the five school days of this week, I only packed a lunch once. Other days, I either ate at Bon Chaz, or at Subway like today (thanks to the gift card Joe got me for my birthday), or, I am ashamed to admit, I just plain skipped lunch except for a Mars bar on my super busy day.

So the only thing I ate was something I am really not supposed to eat. Shameful.

Hopefully, I will be once more in sync with the universe next week, and I will be bringing lunches and eating them in the lounge with everyone else once again. Doing so is my best chance of somehow learning to go with the flow and be a part of things and maybe get a better understanding of when I am getting along and when I am talking moon language to people, and try to minimize the latter.

Slow, I shall remove the doofus from my personality, and replace it with awesomeness.

And then… I will RULE THE WORLD.

Or at least be able to secure gainful employment.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was a lot better than yesterday.

Not that things got any easier. Quite the opposite. I worked really hard. But that was the best thing for me, I think.

First up today was Format, and I just plain had not done the assignment. There came a point where I had to prioritize and I chose not to do the one that seemed thuddingly dull. So I came into class ready to take my lumps for not having done it.

But first the teacher was fifteen minutes late because VFS apparently double booked her, and she had been teaching another class. So in a sense we stole her from that class. Their loss was our gain, although, of course, from my POV, she could have stayed with the other class all day.

When she started class, the presentations began, and I was nervous as hell. Not only did I have no presentation, I had a double assignment due in my afternoon class and I hadn’t done that, either. What can I say, I had gotten super far behind.

But the thing is, Format class takes place in the computer lab of 198 West Hastings. So I was sitting in front of a computer while stressing about being called upon for the first time in my life. ^[eek!] And I realized that I could just work on the stuff for my afternoon class while other people blathered on about whether the episode title was separated from the show title in the header by a dash or a colon.

Just typing that sentence makes me wince. I am not a detail oriented person. These minutiae make my head spin. I mean, who the fuck cares? And hearing the prof tell each student “Good work, very detailed!” at the end of each presentation only confirmed that I was on an alien planet hostile to my particular form of life.

Anyhoo, I worked like a self-employed dog on my assignment for the other class, and by 11:30 am, I realized that a miracle was in the making : these things were taking around fifteen minutes each, and there was two people left to go besides me!

So having completed the first half of my two part afternoon assignment, I just kind of moseyed off to the bathroom for the last fifteen minutes of class, and what do you know, I dodged the bullet and never had to admit that I had not done the assignment. Though I am pretty sure the prof knew what I was up to, and told me I could do it next week as a kindness.

During lunchtime, I just barely managed to get the second part of my Script Structure assignment done, and so, miracle diablu, I actually got that shit done on time. Yay me! And the thing is, while it was stressful, it also felt pretty good.

Turns out I really am happiest when I am busy!

I had been doubting that lately, especially yesterday. Everything had seemed so overwhelming, and I felt so tired, and it was really seeming like I had bit off more than I could chew with this whole VFS thing and the whole “I can’t wait to be busier” thing was pure naivete because when I had been thinking that, I hadn’t been factoring in how tired I would be when doing it all.

But today, I got my second wind, thanks to some tension, pressure, and hard work, and I actually felt pretty good. Or at the very least, I was too busy to notice how I felt, and sometimes that’s the same thing. I had something to pour my energies into without restraint, and the result was that I got a lot of tension out and a lot of endorphins in.

So bring it on. I wish I had even more to do, but as far as I know, I don’t. Sometime soon – Saturday at the latest – I am going to go through my schedule and input every assignment whose due date is known into my little student calendar app, and hopefully that will keep me informed enough that I don’t fall behind like this again.

There are mental prosthetics for absentminded people in this world. You just have to remember to use them!

My work last night was great too. It was eight pages of screenplay and it took most of the evening to do, but I like the finished product and look forward to doing the table read of it in class tomorrow morning. Perhaps I will post it here sometime soon.

And I realized something while doing it. Every time I sit down to write real fiction (as opposed to this journaling), there is a transitory moment where I think, “Oh right, writing’s hard. ”

Nothing ever comes of it, and once I get warmed up it’s not so bad, but for a moment it’s like I had completely forgotten than writing requires enormous effort and total engagement. I imagine it’s what it is like when an athlete’s first day of spring training. Sure, they have been working out to stay in shape, but not at anything like what they do when the pre-season begins.

I know a lot about sports for a total nerd.

Once I am warmed up, it’s just a matter of pushing and pushing until the goddamned thing is done. I don’t know what other writers’ processes are like, but for me, it’s akin to taking a long and difficult dump. It might not be fun getting it out, but it sure feels good having it out!

But mostly, it just feels good to burn. Burn through my energies, and in doing so, burn out a lot of the leftover emotional crap that clogs my pathways like silt clogs a river.

And yup…. that’s more water imagery.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been bad.

Once more, I have let a bunch of homework sneak up on me. I am sure I was told of all of these assignments. I just forgot them in the interim, wasting my life playing video games when I should have been getting some goddamned work done.

I am going to have to make video games a much, much smaller part of my life if I am to keep up with my workload. Shit’s already started and already I am dropping the ball. It will only get worse from here, so I am going to have to get my poop in a group and make peace with spending my evenings doing schoolwork instead of wasting time in mental masturbation, otherwise I’ll be fucked.

Right now, I am feeling very overwhelmed by it all. Kind of like when I was crashing and burning in Linguistics class, only not as severe. But I have that same feeling of my mind freezing up on me and not being able to think straight, making it very easy to panic and feel like staying in bed until it all goes away.

I won’t do that, of course. If for no other reason than I am on the hook for the $20,250 tuition whether I finish studies or not. Besides, this is my dream : I must persist.

And those loser voices in my head that say things like “quit now! go hide! Too hard!” and “I’m just not cut out for this” and other such nonsense grow fainter every day. I feel their tug, but it’s very weak, and mostly I just let them pass through my mind unaccosted and unhindered, gone like yesterday’s sunset.

I have a weapon to use against the disorganized chaos in my head. I have downloaded a student calendar app to my tablet, and in theory, if I put all my assignment into it, I will always be able to see what assignment is due when, and hopefully that will help me figure out what I should be working on that night.

The brutal truth is that depression doesn’t just fuck with your mood, it fucks with your mentation as well. Right now, my executive function is underperforming. That’s very common with people with depression. All those bad chemicals really gum up the gears. And that is what is tripping me up now.

And forgetting assignment isn’t the worst of it. I misread my schedule this morning, mistaking Thursday for today, and thought I didn’t have to show up at school till 10 am, and class would be in the computer room in the basement. I get to the computer room, nobody there. I go up to the writing floor, and find out how badly I fucked up, and go to the class I was supposed to go to. At 9 am.

So I got marked absent for a class because I was too mentally incoherent to read a simple chart correctly. This shit is getting serious. I am getting scared.

How the hell am I going to complete my studies if this kind of thing keeps happening? There’s only so many times I can fuck up without it affecting my grade, and after that, causing me to fail. And if I failed out of my dream education, it would damn near kill me… or make me kill myself. I keep thinking I need some kind of mental prosthesis, like crutches for the brain, in order to get around in the complicated real world, with so much to remember and keep track of.

Tries to get some work done during lunch, but I just can’t work when there are people talking around me. Like I have said before, I only have one verbal circuit, and if it’s busy interpreting conversation I am hearing, it is not available for something as complex and intricate as writing.

Sometimes it gets so bad that I can’t even have music with lyrics playing when I write. Instrumental only.

So next time I want to get work done at school, I will try going down to the computer lab. Hopefully there won’t be people talking in there. I would be all for the computer room being treated like a library or a quiet study room. People are there to work, and you have the rest of the fucking school to use for conversation. Let this one spot be.

I can see me getting into a verbal fracas over that in the future. Probably with a group of women. This I foresee.

I have to get this stupid assignment for Format class where I read two teleplays, one from a half-hour TV show and one from an hour-long show, then give a presentation on the differences, and how a TV script is not like a movie script, and why each show has its own particular format.

How incredibly dull. I kind of stopped paying attention once the prof told us that Final Draft takes care of that shit. I know intellectually that learning the industry standard format is important and a lot of places will throw out a badly formatted document without reading a single word, but seriously? Fifteen minutes on the subject, and every single one of us talking about the same thing using different shows, and with only two hours to get through all our presentations?

It’s like some kind of crushingly boring curse.

I will do it, of course. This evening, after supper. I will find the scripts to read, inhale them, and try to figure out how to get these obvious things across in a way that is at least a little entertaining. Should be able to knock that out in an evening, I hope the fifteen minutes is not a minimum, though, as I really don’t want to talk about this subject for that long.

I also have to finish my short script, which was due today as it turns out, but I have been given an extension till 1 pm tomorrow. I have gone with the Canadian Intervention thing, but I may abandon it in favour of something more plot oriented, as I am having trouble justifying it being a short film and not just a skit.

I’m not worried. I’m good at plot. Plot is just story, and I am mad great at story.

So I have two major homework assignments to do tonight. Lovely.

At least one of them involves actual writing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been a trip.

It started last night. When I was at the food court^[yum] with Felicity last night, I realized I had left both my book and my tablet behind at the Bearpit (AKA Theater 2 at 420 Homer), just like I had done the last time I had been there.

I figure it’s because my bag is black and everything in the Bearpit being black (walls, floors, ceiling) and that makes it hard for me to know which end of my bag is up, so I end up picking it up upside down, and stuff falls out. And it does so silently because of the fuzzy black carpeting.

So when I figured this out, I didn’t freak out much. I knew the stuff was probably under the seat I had been sitting in, and that I could just get it back today.

The one problem was access. Like everything else at 420 Homer, the theaters are locked^[click], and my student ID card can’t unlock them. Only profs and staff can. And the only time I had to get my stuff back was during lunch, and during lunch, there’s no classes in the Bearpit, so…. Catch-22.

So I went to Bon Chaz to have lunch. It’s the only place I eat in that magic four blocks between the Skytrain and school at 198 West Hastings. There’s a lot of places, but Bon Chaz is the first one I tried and I liked it so much that I haven’t tried anywhere else.

What can I say, I am not an explorer by nature. I find someplace I like, and I stay there until I have a reason to leave.

When I got back to 198 West Hastings at around 12:45, I went to Steve and asked him how I could arrange for someone to be there to open the door when class was over. He didn’t know, but told me I should go over to the Bearpit right then, and he would tell my favorite prof, Rick Drew, that I would be a little late for class.

This plan, because it involved being late for class on purpose, would not have occurred to me at my current level of mentation. I am still not firing on all cylinders, so my mind is not running at full speed yet, and I am even more clueless and confused than usual.

And that’s saying something.

Oh right, before I forget : I showed up at school at the usual time today, only to find out that I actually had no morning class and I could have just stayed home in my nice warm bed and got all the sleep I needed, and probably played some Fallout 4 as well.

Oh. I bought Fallout 4. It’s complicated, but engrossing. Currently having trouble fighting a dinosaur. As one does.

SO once more, for like the sixth time, I went into one of the classrooms and was greeting by the B group (I’m in A) and told I was in the wrong class and had to go check the posted schedule to see that, yes, I had somehow missed the big letter B after the listing and I could have just stayed home.

D’oh! Oh well. I am gradually transitioning from beating myself up over such things to just assuming it’s all part of my unique charm. “There goes Michael, with his head in the clouds as usual!”.

I hope people tell stories of my clueless behaviours when I am not around. I’d like to be the sort of person people tell stories about. That way, I can entertain them even when I am not in the room.

Plus, ya know, I am desperate for any kind of validation. Negative attention is still attention!

Anyhow, that brings me to the “broken” chapter of my tale, and that’s the hardest one because it’s the one that has affected me most on an emotional level. You see….

I broke my very awesome and expensive headphones.

And while I generally don’t get too attached to material belongings, headphones are a special case for me because they connect me with music and so I end up with a deep emotional connected with them. They become such an intimate part of my life.

But not if I keep breaking them. I don’t even know when it happened. At some point, I took them out of my bag, and the right hand side was crushed where headphone and connecting wire meet. Everything electrical is still technically intact but I am pretty sure they will be impossible to wear that way, and that’s kind of the point.

And that rips a big wet hole in my self-esteem. This is why I can’t have nice things! All I have to do is avoid destroying things by using them, and I would be a happy man. But no, I am so clueless and klutzy and absentminded that I end up stepping on it, or knocking it off a shelf, or sitting on it, or whatever.

Yes, my siblings, I now realize how I ended up breaking so much stuff when I was a wee thing. I was such a hazard.

The only stable belongings I have are things that can take that kind of abuse, like books and clothing and modern devices built to be klutz-proof. Those headphones never stood a chance. Before today I had already half-broken them, just as mysteriously. So I was already on thin ice with myself.

But today just takes the motherfucking cake. I get so frustrated with myself over this kind of thing. I try so hard, but I just keep fucking up, and it drives me crazy.

Basically, I am just plain sick and tired of putting up with my own bullshit.

But it’s not like there’s anyone else to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.