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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!