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.