He just keeps going around, and around, and around…

Was having lunch at local eateries Bob’s Sandwiches (it’s a diner, and I love diners) when it occurred to me that my mind is always working, always probing, always trying to figure things out, always grinding out more information via deduction, always distilling and purifying, and always, always busy.

It’s like some steampunk steel factory in here.

And the thing that powers the whole show is a hamster on a wheel, and the hamster’s name is Anxiety.

My deep down sense of unsafeness keeps that rodent running 24/7. It doesn’t even sleep when I’m asleep. It never stops, and much of my psyche is built around what to do with all that nervous energy. That’s why I need so much mental exercise. It’s the best way I know to use that energy, and even that is not one hundred percent effective. A lot of forms of mental exercise are also mentally stimulating, and that creates its own energy and its own stream of sensation to process.

And my in-box overfloweth.

If one could peer into my mind like it was a simple diorama, one would not suspect that it’s the hamster powering this sparks and steam factory. Because there in the center of it all, in the place where time flows like water and all things come together, is that fiercely burning star that, like its owner, is painfully bright and incredibly hot. It acts like a fusion reactor, and I have layer upon layer of shielding protecting the outside world from its intensity and its radiation.

It would be easy to think that must be my power source. But it occurred to me today that it isn’t. It is merely the product of intense internal pressures and often acts not as a source of energy but a way to use it up. An outlet for all the pressures that make my inner landscape so seismically unstable. Thinking it is the power source is like thinking a light bulb is a power source because it’s so shiny.

so while I probably do get some of my motive force from emotional geothermal taps, most of that energy is used simply to keep the forge of my creativity white hot and ready. The energy that keeps the lights on and my inner computer powered up is strictly hamster-electric.

On a deep level, I feel like if that hamster ever stops, I will die. The lights will go out and never come back on again. I know this to be irrational, but that doesn’t change what is going through that little hamster’s tiny rodent brain : fear. Fear of stopping. Fear of not being able to start again. Fear of what might happen in the dark. Fear of my own inner demons.

I keep talking about part of me still being that scared little animal who is always desperately looking for the way out and, if cornered, is perfectly capable of savage violence.

Turns out that scared little animal was a hamster all this time.

Today was not good.

Today’s class was Sketch. I wrote my skit of the week last night. And I knew it wasn’t very good.

Even getting to the point where I had written a bad skit was agony. I wrote the beginning of the skit then got stuck. It was turning out to be far harder to write than I thought it would be, thanks to the summer brain drain. I just couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think of idea, couldn’t plan things in my head. And that made me start to panic, which of course just made it worse.

Adrenalin is great for outrunning a saber tooth tiger or helping you win a fight, but it is terrible for complex thought.

Feeling awful, I decided it was time to check out the files full of skit ideas I have in order to get an idea for something easier and more fun to write. But they ended up just making things worse because to be honest, most of them were not that good. At least, they were not good for the purpose of writing a skit for class. They are quite high on the wackiness factor, which is boffo if you are making a Monty Python’s Flying Circus type genre-bending TV show but not so great if you are writing skits to be performed on stage.

And some of them are just…. sad. We came up with them a decade ago, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if they seem a tad unsophisticated to me now. But I had this idea that I had this kickass secret weapon in the form of over 1200 awesome skit ideas, and the reality is… not so much.

Of course, my nuclear option is to use one of the actual skits I wrote way back then. But now I am kind of afraid to look at them, in case they don’t hold up either. I would rather go on with the feeling that I am brilliant at skit.

Otherwise, I may just fall apart,

From the minute I finished the lame-ass skit to when it was presented in class today, I was dreading it. Waiting my turn in class was very bad. I had several panic attacks. And of course, I ended up being second last because Jackie decides who is going next by asking “OK, who wants to go next?” and I simply cannot compete with the young people with their faster reflexes.

The only reason I didn’t go last was because my bud James held back so I wouldn’t be last. I guess because I was sitting next to him, he could see how frustrated I was. Thanks, James!

So I had panic attacks and got very depressed, and started to wonder if I was funny at all, and all that craziness. It was not a pleasant morning.

But I feel somewhat better now, and after I sleep I will feel a lot better. And then tomorrow is another day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Like my mind.

Still experiencing summer dullness. Still having trouble thinking of what to say. All I want to do is be lazy. But I have to write a blog entry and a skit, in roughly that order.

And I feel very duh.

Today, I had Dialogue class. We had a lot of fun shooting video of some very short dialogues we wrote in the last hour of last week’s class. It was amusing and in a way heartwarming to see how many of my fellow writing students did not want to act in front of the camera at all. Even though none of it would go online. We’re an introverted bunch, and many people said something alone the lines of “I want to be behind the camera, that’s why I’m a writer!”.

Being the mental mutant that I am, I didn’t mind at all, because I am both a shy introvert and a total ham. I have never had stage fright, I have no problem with public speaking, and I have never had a problem with being the center of attention.

In fact, under the right circumstances, I love it.

And I think I know why : because it’s never gone badly for me. The first time I did anything like that was when I gave a speech in front of a bunch of adults when I was a Beaver Scout (about what, I have no idea) and I got thunderous applause for it. Ever since then, every time I have acted or done any sort of public speaking, it’s gone at least okay and often very well. As a result, I am relaxed when I do it, and that leads to good performances.

A rare example of a positive feedback loop in my life.

I am pretty sure I have a natural knack for it. Especially comedy. And like I have said many times before, I also relax on stage because life is very simple and easy when I perform. It banishes all my paranoia about whether I am doing the right thing caused by my constant awareness of all the things I might be doing, and replaces it with the super simplified reality of knowing exactly what you are supposed to be doing at that moment : delivering your lines.

For someone who lives awash in possibilities and doubt like I do, that’s a very welcome island of stability.

I have the skills to be an actor… but not the looks. Guys who look like me get to stay behind the camera. Even if I was my ideal weight, I would still have highly limited castability. Best I could hope for would be to play some heavies (so to speak) in B-movies. Nobody in the world of A-list Hollywood writes roles for big dudes like me. There’s the rare funny fat guy who makes it to the top, but there’s only a few slots available at any time, so competition is fierce.

More importantly, I lack motivation. Acting is fun but it’s not a career path I would enjoy. There is a lot of superficiality and bullshit involved in trying to be a movie star or whatever. And I could never be content as someone who interprets the words of others. I have to be at the top of the creative food chain and that’s the writer. The entertainment world treats us like we’re the least important people because we tend to lack assertiveness and because there’s more non-writers in the process than writers, and our job involves very little that is visible so it’s easy for shallow minded people to convince themselves that it must not be very important.

But without us, there’s nothing. We are the ones who create movies and TV shows out of nothing at all. Everyone else in the process is working of what we wrote. Not a single cog in the entertainment machine could turn without what we make.

I would make a very good writer’s union president. Lemme at’m!

I realized today in class that, all else being equal, I tend to try to turn everything into comedy. It’s what I am good at and what I enjoy. I love to laugh and I love to make people laugh. And making comedy is like, the most fun thing ever. I have written a lot of things that were not comedic and a few things that are incredibly tragic. To the point of me crying the whole time I was writing. ^[1]

But put me in front of an audience, even if it’s just classmates and a teacher, and I wanna make them laugh.

Which is maybe me problem, or one of them anyhow. I try too hard. And I try to be like a fictional character, funny and fun and lovable and whatnot, instead of just being myself. I suppose it’s my substitute for social skills and the deep socialization that leads to them. If I could just permit myself to relax and be (gasp!) normal for a minute or two, I might find the connection I crave.

Instead, I tend to follow a kind of dream in my mind, wherein I imagine what I want to be and try to project that. I am always trying to cram as much of all I need to express into every moment. Perhaps this is because of my enormous feelings of being ignored and unimportant and the resulting deep need for attention. When I get the attention, I go nuts and lunge for the opportunity with all the care and restraint of a starving dog pouncing on a steak.

If I could just calm the fuck down inside and take things as they come instead of having this cacophony of neurosis going full speed all the time, maybe I could get along with people better.

Or maybe what I really need is more situations where I feel like I am in control and can find my own way of doing it.

Maybe I need to be in charge.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Title, of course, based on this song :

Been pondering that question of self-expression versus fitting in lately.

I’ve always been ferociously myself. Even as a kid, I instinctively rebelled against anything that I felt confined my right to expressing who I am, crazy smart brain and all. And to this day, when I contemplate dialing back on the smart talk and learning to keep it in check in order to get along, a very strong voice inside me screams “FUCK YOU! I am who I am and that’s it! I’m a five dimensional peg and I refuse to have two of my dimensions sanded off in order to fit in your square fucking hole! If you can’t handle that, that’s YOUR problem, motherfucker!”

And the thing is, in the eyes of an individualistic culture, that’s the right answer. Lots of people would applaud my insistence on being who I truly am, consequences be damned. Modern individualist cultures say that’s a perfectly fine thing to do, and that society should just back off and let me be myself.

But the thing is, I’m lonely.

Being a loner leads to loneliness. An inability to compromise is never a good thing when it’s a subject as broad as personal identity. I mock and deride conservatives for their inflexibility of mind, but am I really so different? Surely there’s some kind of compromise towards being understood (and not getting those dreaded blank stares) that I could live with.

Not everything I have to say needs to be a scintillating, coruscating expression of my inner essence. There’s nothing inherently wrong with small talk. Sure, it’s not what I want or prefer, but so what?

It all comes down to how badly I want to fit in and connect and not feel like an alien any more. On some level, I suppose, I am waiting to find the milieu in which I feel comfortable without having to dumb myself down or otherwise suppress my true self. And it’s a great dream, but I am not sure how realistic it is. Maybe that’s just an excuse to indefinitely postpone having to grow up enough to get along with others. Maybe I need to learn to bend a little towards being social and learning to read a situation deeply enough to keep up with the herd.

Maybe I would be happy if I was less of a maverick and more of a well behaved cow.

Because the thing is, my social paradise might not exist at all. That I wouldn’t fit in without compromise amongst the brainiest people in the world. Or the most creative, or the funniest, or whoever. I still hold out hope that comedy writers, and TV people in general, will be my kind of people. But they might not be, and I have to face that.

And there’s still this barrier between me and others that makes my responses a little slow and my aim with my jokes and comments to be terrible. It’s like trying to paint through smoked glass.

And now we change subject because I finally remembered what I meant to write about today.

Today, I had Advanced Story And Character (ASAC), and for the most part, I was bored.

And out of said boredom came the realization that I don’t need a lot of the instruction I get in my classes because I do it all intuitively. I don’t need to learn a method for coming up with story ideas, or help structuring a story, or instructions on how to come up with characters. For me, I often get all of that as part of the initial idea, or I get the idea and the rest comes to me immediately afterwards, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, clicking together.

Not that I am claiming to be a perfect writer. Far from it. I have so much to learn. It’s simply that the things I need to learn can’t be taught as theory.

That’s why I love having my stuff workshopped so much. I learn so much about writing in such a short period of time because other people can see flaws and weaknesses that I can’t and when I learn about them, I can feel my mind expanding and my understanding deepening. I always come away from it feeling great.

Admittedly, part of that is that I just got a large dose of the attention I crave. But not all of it!

A particular bugbear of mine came up : theme. In a nutshell, I hate theme. To me, the theme of the work is mostly something scholars come up with after the fact to make themselves seem important, and like they really “get” the writer.

But it’s bullshit. Nobody worth reading sits down with a theme in mind. Good writers tell stories. They don’t give a shit about theme. To me, getting people to think about theme before writing (or during) is putting the cart before the horse and putting the horse in backwards as well.

My prof likes to talk about how a lot of Ernest Hemingway’s work is about what it means to be a man and grace under fire. And maybe that is true… I don’t know.

But what I do know is that Hemingway never sat down at the typewriter thinking “Well, time for another story about what it means to me a man”. He sat down to write a story. If someone had told him that he had written about the same thing a lot, he would have started writing something else. Theme is nothing that the readers or the writers need worry about.

It’s strictly for English profs and their ilk to divine and contemplate and argue over. The cranky writer in me wants to shout “Stop looking up your own ass and read the fucking story!”.

So what I am saying is that I probably won’t appear on many Book TV type shows more than once.

I sometimes have something to say in my stories. But it’s not something I think about. And I don’t think any writer should.

Just write the fucking story.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Have I used that joke before? Whatever.

I have to say, the words, they come slow these last few days. The weather has been summery (for a fucking change) and my mind has gone into vacation mode where it empties itself of all heavy thoughts and shifts into “lazy self-indulgence” mode. This greatly reduces my usually robust supply of surplus thoughts and so I actually have to think of what to say instead of just kind of opening the faucet and letting all the excess mental energy drain onto the page.

That makes blogging feel like actual work. And my silly brain keeps insisting I’m on vacation and don’t have to do any work. I just have to keep myself amused. Like a kid.

So it’s a little bit more of a struggle than usual. I suppose my stimulation level is down too, it being the weekend. That also means that I can’t just talk about my day at school. I have to talk about my day at home, and well, that’s bloody boring. Too boring for this blog, and that’s saying something.

You know what I did yesterday? Did laundry, ate Chinese food, and played Fallout 4. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I quite enjoyed it, and it helped recharge the ol’ batteries. We all need downtime so we can replenish our stress-depleted supplies of reward stimulus, because without enough reward, we don’t feel like we’re good people.

It really is that simple. People need a certain amount of reward (that is, stimulus to the reward center of the brain) in order to feel good about themselves, and the world, and that is what drives most of what we do. And modern life has a way of draining it out of us because it requires so much self-denial and suppression of instinctual responses. We have a very large amount of complex social information to deal with on a daily basis, and the part of us that is still a primitive primate gets tired of it all and starts to rattle its cage.

So we appease it by trying to balance the drain with various high reward activities. The most common of these, of course, is high reward food and drink. People wonder why these things are so hard to quit. The answer is that you can’t simply excise a huge proportion of your reward stimulus without having something to use as a replacement. And it has to be something that can equal the original reward stimuli in total stimulus if not in stimulus intensity.

Part of the problem is that the stronger the stimuli, the bigger the emotional impression it makes and the harder we lock in to that source of stimulus. That was great back in the state of nature because our taste buds were more or less aligned to what was actually good for us. In the wild, it’s very important to get a lot of calories (sweet), enough salt to be able to do things like manufacture urine and regulate its hydration levels (salty), get enough fat to keep our highly demanding nervous systems working (fatty), and that we get enough protein to keep up with our fairly harsh metabolic demands (umami).

But now, we can create supra-normal stimuli for all these things, and this ultra-strong stimuli leads to ultra strong fixation. Our minds get programmed to demand that extremely high level of stimulation to the reward center, and when we try to diet and start to crave these things, that’s what is going on. Our reward levels are dropping, and the fixation effect makes it very difficult to believe that any other source of reward stimulation will be able to act as a substitute.

Especially not when we know damned well that the thing we crave is easily and readily available.

I just had a scary thought : what if someone invented a substance that stimulated the reward center of your brain directly? A substance that could be added to any food item to make it more rewarding to eat. I can see it starting out as a thing to make healthy food more palatable, but then it would be put in everything just like sugar is, and just like with sugar the amount of it in the public diet would creep up over time.

Especially if it was widely believed to be totally harmless. Something that is either easily and harmlessly metabolized by our bodies, or something that is nutritionally inert like Splenda and just passes right through us. Maybe we would only find out how badly it is fucking us up when it is far too late for us to wean ourselves off the stuff.

Or worse, it could truly be completely harmless, and we could all end up addicted to it without knowing it because it’s in everything… unless we go a couple weeks without it, and then we have harsh psychological withdrawal symptoms when the last of it is out of our systems.

That reminds me of something I saw about treating depression with an implant that stimulates the reward center of the brain electrically. Not to the point of ecstasy, or even happiness. Just a constant low level stimulus to keep the reward level from going below a certain point.

As a depressive, the thought intrigues me. It would certainly be nice to have some sort of solid stimulus upon which to anchor my mood. A lot of my issues boil down to emotional instability, so any stabilizing influence would be welcome.

As a scientist (type), though, I would worry about long term effects. Would we find that the patients’ minds adapt to the new situation just like they do to drugs, and hence build up a tolerance that can only be overcome by increasing the stimulation? Would it have a warping effect on personality, bending people toward arrogance and overconfidence? Or even sociopathy?

I might just have to write a sci fi story in order to figure it all out.

No promises, tho. I got other stuff to write.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about respect today.

Respect has never been one of the variables I have pursued. I have always concentrated on being liked and people thinking I am brilliant. Obviously, respect is connected to both of them, especially the brilliance, but perhaps because of my deeply empathic nature, I have always wanted warmth over all, and the easiest form of warmth for me to get has been affection.

Not the physical kind, more’s the pity. But the kind I get through being charming and entertaining and funny and so forth. Few things make me happier than to see my own light reflected in others. And that seems to be the only way for me to feel the warmth from my own light as well.

As if the only way I can feel the warmth I crave is through empathy. Sheesh, no wonder I’m so desperate for attention!

Respect, to me, has always seem like a cold thing, suitable for people who take themselves far too seriously and a poor substitute for actually being interesting. I suppose I had it confused with “respectability”, a concept that has always seemed toxic to me. So stultifyingly bourgeoisie!

XTC has it right :

It’s like dullness codified into a system of ethics. Hordes of middle class families competing to be “more normal than thou”, a gobsmackingly ridiculous thought on the face of it. Petty status squabbles, people trying to one-up one another via mindless consumerism, venomous jealousy aimed at people whose only crime is having a slightly nicer patio set than yours… and all under a veneer of “normal life”.

I am so glad my family never gave a shit about that stuff. Then again…. we were one of the more prosperous families in the neighborhood…. hmmmm….

You know, it’s just possible other people were trying to keep up with us. God, I hope not. We were never that impressive!

But respect and respectability (sounds like an Emily Bronte novel^[1]) are not the same thing. You can be respected without being boring. Respect is more about being esteemed, and that’s something I desire quite strongly. I want to be valued. I have felt worthless for a very long time, probably because I was not supporting myself and didn’t have a life outside the apartment and the Internet, and quite frankly, had pretty much nothing to offer society, or so I thought.

I have at least reached the point in my recovery when I can look back at the infinite regression of my self-esteem and shake my head, wondering what the fuck that was all about. I can see that it was not about my actual merits, it was about having very little to anchor my self-image. All it took was depression to act like gravity and pull me down, and I cratered time and time again.

And when you crash over and over for long enough, you stop trying to fly. It’s the only way to preserve what little health you have left before total oblivion.

And to be honest, that state is never very far away. There are still times when I become depressed and can’t imagine why anyone would even tolerate me, let alone respect me. Like I am nothing but a burden on the world who makes life worse for whoever knows him, and who is completely devoid of substance or worth.

That’s the depression talking, of course. If I summon the full powers of my emotion-suppressing metabrain, I can slow myself down enough to slowly enumerate the many assets I have. I have a stunningly high IQ, I have great verbal skills, I am highly creative and very funny, and on top of all that, I’m a heck of a guy.

The fact that I haven’t found a way to turn all that into a career yet doesn’t make it all worthless. The whole point of going to VFS is to do that very thing – hook me up with a career. The fact that I am doing it more than twenty years after most people do it doesn’t change a thing. It’s still the right thing to do, and when I graduate (with honors, if that’s a thing) from the place, I will be well suited to go be an amazing TV writer with twenty years of ideas stored in his capacious noggin.

I might have to lie about my age, though.

I should keep all my good points on a business card, so I can it out when I am feeling worthless and build myself back up. On the reverse side, I can print the nice things that Michael Baser, head of the Writing track, said about me when I got admitted.

Hell, I should have that shit framed on the wall.

Part of the problem is that VFS is not that big on grades. I haven’t checked my folder lately, but as of this moment I have not gotten much in the way of grades back, and I guess I can admit that grades are what keep people like me going. We need the feedback that tells us we are getting it right or we descend into self-doubt.

There’s two possible explanations for the lack of marking. One is that VFS is a groovy art school that doesn’t believe in restricting our artistic freedom by tying it to arbitrary numbers, man.

The other is that the teachers there don’t like marking and there is a culture there that tacitly allows them to put it off as long as they like – sort of a “if you call me on my bullshit, I will call you on yours” kind of thing. It could very well be that stuff I did in my first month of school still hasn’t been marked.

The third, and probably most likely, explanation is that administration at the school is a rolling clusterfuck of biblical proportions, and everything has been marked and they just never got around to, ya know, tell us.

I will ask Michael Baser next time I see him.

But I will, of course, check my folder first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

IO

I just can’t win.

Today, I wore my jacket – my thick black leather jacket – to school. And it kept me warm in the morning.

But then afternoon rolls around and it’s sunny and hot and I am sweltering. When I came home from school today at around 1:30 pm, I felt like I was being broiled alive. So right now, I feel like the next time I am going to school in the morning, I will probably skip taking the jacket entirely.

And thus, freeze my ass off in the morning. Sigh.

Oh well. Today’s class was awesome. We workshopped that beat sheet from my movie, and I got a lot of highly valuable feedback. Feedback that I am going to apply ASAP. And that… is going to be a heck of a lot of work.

That’s no surprise. After all, it’s my first beat sheet ever and it’s for my first feature film ever. It was highly unlikely that I would get it right the first time. And every screenwriter working in the industry goes through many drafts before they are done.

In fact, one of the bits of advice we’ve been given about The Biz is that all drafts are first drafts until someone buys them. That way, you can get them to pay you for the second draft, the third draft, final script, the shooting script, and so forth.

But this is still very new to me. I am, as faithful readers know, the sort of person who writes it, posts it, and forgets it. Which is fine for a blog like this one where it’s mostly just a way to express what is in my head that day and so it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect or not.

But obviously that’s not the way anything else works. If I want to be a working TV writer, I am going to have to acclimatize myself to rewrite after rewrite. No more fire and forget – now it’s hold and perfect. Which is new.

I think I can do it, though, as long as there’s someone else in the loop acting as editor. I can do a draft, hand it in to the head writer, have him or her order a bunch of changes, and go do them. That won’t be too harsh an adjustment for me.

It’s perfecting it on my own that I can’t do. I have to fire and forget because if I stay with it, all my belief that it is any good will disappear, and I will hate it and want it destroyed and hate myself. I am just that emotionally unstable.

But at least I am not so arrogant as to think every word I write is unalloyed perfection and to change it would be like pissing on the Mona Lisa. I know it’s far from perfect, and that “less than perfect” is not the same thing as “so devoid of merit that all who gaze upon it are struck blind”. Even the best writers in the world don’t get it right the first time.

I’m just glad my chosen profession doesn’t require perfection on the first shot. Sure, I have to make it good enough to show to the head writer (or whoever), but I don’t have to deliver polished perfection straight out of the gate.

And I need that kind of margin for error.

I have another skit to write, like I said yesterday. No idea for that “memorable comic character” yet. If I can’t think of anything better, I will default to writing a skit based around what will clearly be a self-insertion character to anyone who knows me. Something a lot like my Fruvous persona, but with the smartass factor dialed way up.

Creating a smartass character is always a big risk. One wrong word and the audience will turn on the smartass and then you are dead in the water. So I will have to make sure that my smartass is both doing it for a good reason and doing it to a very deserving target, punching WAY up. And make sure none of the smartass remarks come across as cruel or abusive.

But if anyone can writer a lovable smartass, it’s me. I’ve been playing one for years.

Or maybe I will go a very different route and create a comic character who is someone old enough to just not give a shit any more and therefore says exactly what is on their mind. And not in a crude way. I picture an elegant lady who is asked to be on some kind of program to comment on something harmless like gardening and uses the opportunity to speak her mind on a variety of topics in a dead on accurate and hilariously dry manner.

Maybe she’s even offered her own show at the end. Could be a fun character to write and even more fun to play.

here it is, middle of July, and I am still trying to figure out how to spend the $50 Indigo.ca gift certificate my sister gave me for my birthday… in May.

What can I say, I’m a victim of option paralysis, as usual. Too many possibilities. I am probably going to buy a PC game of some sort, but which one? Bioshock Infinite? It has AMAZING reviews but it’s three years old now and I was hoping to get a game other people are playing right now, for a change. The latest Heroes of Might and Magic? Indigo doesn’t have it. Ditto the new Master of Orion, but that is probably because it isn’t done yet.

And it seems like it’s only going to be a “collector’s edition” of the first three games anyhow. Would be nice to play them with souped up sound and graphics, but still. Lame!

Or I could try to figure out a more practical gift, something that would help me at school. But what might that be? Writing does not lend itself to technological enhancement. I could get some new Bluetooth headphones, but all the ones on Indigo are the super expensive “beats by Dre” kind and fuck paying $250 for headphones.

Oh well. I am sure I will figure it out eventually.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling like the deadwood is building up inside of me and what I really need is a quick but thorough brushfire to clean that shit out.

I also feel like I am rocking a serious sleep deficit. I get the feeling I am gonna meed a whole lot of sleep this weekend. Which sort of sucks, as I would rather, ya know…. do things.

I am now on my third character in Fallout 4. I beat the game with my big barbarian earlier this week. Got pretty good with him. And there’s a lot of satisfaction in wielding a Conan sized sword and carving a swath of justice through the forgotten wastelands of a post apocalyptic world. I had fun as Thule.

My new character is known simple as The Engineer, and the idea behind her is that she’s extremely intelligent and perceptive, which in game terms means she can learn skills like lockpicking, science, chemistry, and gun modification. It also means she’s a crack shot and a heck of a sniper.

It is very interesting playing my first female character. I am discovering a lot of things about my own gender assumptions. One of the strongest reactions has been this nagging sense that this character should be male. Like part of me can’t believe there can be a hyper intelligent female engineer, or at least wants to switch the gender to what I consider “normal” in the situation.

I had no idea I harbored these feelings. It could be that I would be feeling the same stress with any female character as the voice of the female main character is distinctly non-male and therefore is a lot less like myself. So it sounds “wrong” to me in a way that the studly male voice of the male version of the main character never did.

And I am not a lot like HIM, either.

I like the female voice. It actually has a lot more expression than the male one. I feel like there’s a broader range of emotional choices open to me now, even though they are the exact same choices as the first two times through the game.

Eventually I will explore the world of mods and expansions to the game. I am determined to get all the gameplay I can out of the game, as games this good don’t come around too often and you have to milk them for all you can.

It’s weird going back to being a ranged fighter, though. I have to relearn some basic survival techniques, like backing away from enemies instead of rushing towards them with intent to smite. I did n’t give my gal a lot of speed or endurance, so she has to rely on caution and planning in order to get through the tough fights.

Well, that, and the super devastating shotgun she made by modifying the funk out of regular shotgun. That sure helps. Close-quarters combat is no problem for her. Ka BLAM.

Did a duh today. Misread the school schedule, showed up for class at 9 am, only to learn that I didn’t have class till 1 pm. The class I thought was this morning is actually taking place tomorrow morning. I could have stayed in bed for as long as I liked instead of schlepping to school. Instead, I ended up reading and napping on a couch in the Student Lounge.

And I have to get up and schlep again tomorrow. But at least I don’t have any classes in the afternoon. So I can come home early.

Next week is looking even more luxurious. I only have one full day of classes, Thursday. The rest are half days. Kickass.

The weirdest thing happened at the Subway across the street from the school, where I get my lunches. The lady who made my sub was either super stoned or just plain crazy, because the whole time I was dealing with her, she was either singing out loud or deep in her throat, which was worse. And she definitely seemed to be a million miles away. Trying to get her to understand what veggies I wanted on my sub was a serious hassle. And I honestly didn’t need this weird wobble added to my day.

One of the results of my usual state of confusion and unreadiness was that I thought my beat sheet for my feature film was due in class today, and that was cool except that my classmate Joss helpfully reminded me that the beat sheet is due to day before class. So I had to come home on Wednesday and bang the thing out as fast as I possibly good, which was not easy.

Then this morning I had to get to school early so I could print out twelve copies of it for class. And I was so proud of myself for getting it all done in time. And only THEN did I find out that the class in question was tomorrow.

Oh well. The job’s done regardless.

Speaking of printing, I recently learned that the printer at school can print on both sides of the paper (cool). It also can automatically collate what you are printing (very cool), and get this, it can STAPLE it as well (holy shit, it’s the future!).

It can also three hole punch it, which is also badass. It can do everything I want it to be able to do besides walking it to class for me. I now worship it a tiny bit.

Overall, I am enjoying school. Getting up in the morning and getting my ass out that door is still hard, but I am pretty sure that’s the universal condition. I am enjoying the writing I am doing. Even writing a hurried beat sheet was kind of fun. I even get to write another skit this weekend, this one featuring a “strong comic character”.

I’m not usually someone who writes from the character out. I tend to come up with the premise then create characters to fit. But I’m adaptable.

And I am really looking forward to a relaxing weekend.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There’s something that comes between me and others that means they don’t really get me and I end up feeling alien and rejected.

Today we did my skit it Sketch class.

This one here : (Skit) One Day At The Steak and Shake. And technically it went over well. Everyone said it was very clever and compared it to Monty Python, which sounds lovely, but…

They didn’t laugh. And if they don’t laugh, what’s the point? I want to make people laugh, not just get them to recognize, in the abstract, that my work is made with skill.

Part of the problem is, I think, that it’s just too fast for people. It’s banter, and banter is risky. If you can pull it off, like in those old Bogey and Bacall movies, it’s delightful. But if you get it wrong, it’s confusing and people can’t keep up and it’s like trying to juggle a dozen balls and not only dropping them all but having them bounce off the audience’s foreheads one by one.

A bigger problem emerged in class : lack of context. I realized that, in my mind, these are two people who have known each other for a long time, and this is just their badinage.

But in writing, what’s in your mind doesn’t count for shit. It’s what’s on the page the matters, and I have nothing in the skit to indicate that. So my fellow writers and the prof read it as some surreal world where ordering the tears of your enemies in a restaurant and getting them is a thing that could actually happen.

Totally did not see that coming, and so clearly I needed this vital lesson in writer’s theory of mind.

It’s an easy fix, I think. All I need to do is add a few lines at the beginning that establish that these two people know each other very well. Something like :

Server : Good morning, Bill.
Customer : Hey there Linda!
Server : How’s your wife doing?
Customer : Oh, she’s fine, turned out to just be the flu.

Or something along those lines. And something similar at the end.

Serve : See you again tomorrow!
Customer : You bet!

That way the audience knows that none of this is serious and it’s just two people playing with words to amuse themselves.

But the whole “not laughing” thing got me thinking about a particular sore tooth of the mind that has been growing and throbbing for attention lately, and that’s the difference between what I think will work and what actually work. I clearly do not get the intended effect from my actions, and when that happens, you have to take a good hard look at both your methods and the mind implementing them.

When theory does not match results, it is theory which must bend.

The things I say are always funny in my head. But often they fall flat in practice when I am not with my little group of friends. I look back and the joke still seems clever and funny to me. So it must be something about my delivery…. or possibly my knowledge of my audience.

There’s that theory of mind issue again.

It would pain me to have to admit to myself that I have poor theory of mind. I pride myself in my ability to understand people and how they tick. But there’s a huge gap between analysis and action, and my ability to comprehend people’s motives and desires in the abstract doesn’t mean I know them in the field.

At the end of the day, all us poor artists can do is make art which pleases us. Then hope to find an audience.

it could be argued that I try too hard, too. It’s so hard for me to relax and be natural. The neurosis is always there, trying to solve all problems via a ferocious application of intellect when, like a Chinese finger trap, the only way out is to just relax.

Like the cliche goes, I need to just relax and be myself. Act without thought sometimes. Be natural. Stop trying to control outcomes by sheer force of mentation and take that leap of faith into concentrating instead on expressing my true self. Be the best me I can be, and hold tight to the idea that everything will work out if I do.

That’s… not going to be easy. I don’t really do faith. I do not say that to brag about how intellectually pure I am. I think my lack of capacity for faith cripples me. There are things you need to believe in order to be psychologically healthy, and some of those things you must believe without evidence. They are too important to leave to the vagaries of reason.

But reason is all I have, so to speak. At least when it comes to trying to make sense of the world and find my place in it. Everything has to be approved by ten different departments of my mind before it is accepted as true, and while there’s a lot of power in the strictly defined open-mindedness of the true skeptic, it is a very cold power and doesn’t do a damned thing to actually make you happy.

In fact, it might be blocking the very happiness you seek.

I wonder if a change in meds would make it easier for me to truly connect with others, and pierce this shell of mine. Paxil keeps me sane, but it does that by applying a kind of chilling effect to my emotions, turning down the volume on the chaos in my mind and giving me vital breathing room so I can heal.

But I worry sometimes that its chill is exactly what keeps me locked in my lonely cage of ice. As if, like coffee in a thermos, there is a layer of hard vacuum between me in the world that no warmth or light can penetrate…. or escape.

And yet, I am in the middle of a rather intense education and therefore it is not a good time to reduce a medication.

Guess I will just stay lonely then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am currently coming to you from my favourite seat in my favorite White Spot, typing into a window 20 pixels tall because that is all that is left after the virtual keyboard and Chrome take tbeir cut.

As usual, it is this or have a teeny tiny virtual keyboard. Whether I am using this smartphone (currently a lot more smart than phone) in landscape or portrait mode, something is gonna suck.

Oh well. My 2 page dialog exercise went over okay, in that the prof Aaron only suggested minor changes.

That is as close to fulsome praise as anyone is ever gonna get from that guy.

Tomorrow, I will be presenting the pitches I did yesterday. I am confident that I will do well in a one-on-one pitching situation. I will know exactly where to focus all my charm and charisma and warmth and wit and that obvious intelligence thing. Plus I have confidence in what I am pitching.

What more do I need?

Home now. Time for thoughts on conservatism.

First, a clarification : I am not talking about classical conservatism or any other form of conservatism, only conservatism as it manifests itself in the world today.

That modern form of conservatism, the Know-Nothing kind, is basically politics for people who are too stupid for civilization.

Modern civilization is just too hard for them. It’s too complicated for their tiny minds. Too many moving parts, too many subtleties, too much ambiguity, and above all, too many people insisting that you should actually think about things instead of just going with your gut.

And where’s the fun in that? Next you’ll be asking them to read when they are not even in school!

Modern conservatism insists that everything is exactly as it feels to them. No thought needed, and that’s exactly how they like it. They have made the choice to build a castle in the sky out of big, colorful building blocks handed to them by Fox News and the rest of their alternate-reality media, and then moved into it and slammed the gates, and their minds, firmly shut.

And in their magical fairy land, everything is simple enough for their minuscule minds. All issues are simple, and all decisions are easy, and the best part is, they don’t ever ever EVER have to think about ANYTHING. All they have to do is pick a person to trust (which is easy, because they all say things that make the conservatives feel good) and do (and believe) whatever those people say, and they can live in their magic rainbow castle forever!

So the real problem is stupidity. Not in a strictly linear intellectual sense – after all, not every liberal is a mental giant either. It’s more of a choice made, or a fear indulged. They are in constant flight from the complex world outside and complex thought inside. And in general, when human beings want to drown out unpleasant thoughts (like that the world might be more complex than they can comprehend without having to enter the dread land of Doubt), they do it by turning up the volume on their emotions until they can’t hear those nasty thinky thoughts ANY MORE.

And anything that fits into their primitive mindset and helps with this use of emotion to beat reason senseless is welcome. That is why they are so deeply and fatally attracted to things that elicit a powerful response from the primitive parts of their brain. Our brains are designed with the capacity for primitive, reptile-brain thoughts to club the ego over the head and let the id take over because certain things, like feeding, drinking, and reproduction just have to get done.

That’s why asceticism does not work. Reason is always on a short leash, and can exist only when the more basic needs are met. By trying to ignore those needs, the ascetic instead makes sure they take up more and more of their minds.

The Greeks had it right. They knew that you had to take care of body needs before you could think clearly.

But I, to put it mildly, digress.

Conservatism takes advantage of this capacity to take reason and restraint out of the picture to keep it stuck in a locker and buried behind the bleachers nearly constantly.

But reason is scrappy. It always makes its way back to the surface of the mind if given a chance. We human beings are essentially thinking creatures and our deep drive to understand the world is not so easily thwarted… so they have to get their fix of reason-suppressing rage and fear quite frequently lest their brains start to work again.

I think one of the things that we liberals often get wrong about conservatives is that these are people for whom an understanding of actual reality is not a high priority. To them, it’s all about emotion management. They want to avoid doubt and uncertainty by reassuring themselves that the world actually is simple enough for them to comprehend, and that’s their top priority. Whether or not the world is really as they believe it to be is beside the point, and is, in face, the exact kind of question they hate because it’s trying to make them think.

This fills them with rage, and that’s exactly the emotion they need to suppress their thinking parts as long as they vent it against the thing that tried to make them think.

That’s why they hate nuance so much. That’s why they are so willing to swallow any line of bullshit that supports their non-thinking agenda. That’s why they flock to people like Donald Trump. Trump gives them the doses of powerful primitive emotion they need, and appeals to their need to follow a “strong” leader who makes them feel safe.

And that has nothing to do with what Trump stands for or says. As Brexit taught the world, modern conservatives do not think their actions through at all and are perfectly willing to go through with their insane policies and then be really surprised when they end in disaster.

All to avoid having to think for themselves.

No wonder they hate liberals. We think all the time!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yes, it’s that time again : time for me to combine blogging and schoolwork. But my pitches will hardly be 500 words each, so there will be other stuff too.

Pitch One : Bob’s Burgers

The A plot : Louise makes friends with the new girl in school and hangs out with her before realizing that the other kids find the new kid weird and gross for being into the exact sort of things Louise is into (blood, guts, death), only is way more open about it. Louise is torn between staying friends with this person she thinks is awesome (and the feeling is mutual) and preserving her own social status. After rather brutally distancing herself from her new friend in a loud and public way, Louise is plagued by guilt, which gives her nightmares of the same thing being done to her. Finally, she goes back to her new friend, apologizes thoroughly, and then very publicly associates herself with her new friend, and says that anyone who has a problem with that had better seriously consider how wise it is to piss off the two creepiest girls in school.

The B plot : Gene meets a girl who is basically a female version of him. At first, they get along great and Gene feels the stirring of love. But then he starts finding everything she does to irritating and gross, and their relationship ends with him shouting “You aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are!”, and in the process, he learns a lot about himself.

The C plot : Tina follows Jimmy Junior into joining a square dancing group, and finds she really loves the precision and order of it. When Zeke convinces JJ that it’s lame and stupid, Tina has to decide whether she likes her new hobby enough when JJ is leaving and tells her she should leave too. Ultimately, she leaves the group to be with him… but not without regrets.

Well that was fairly painless. But I have been developing those notions for weeks. Now I have to come up with another one.

Here goes nuthin’.

Pitch Two : Brooklyn 99

The A Plot : The whole precinct is activated when a lovable old uniformed officer named Rex who’s been there forever disappears. The trail twists and turns, first looking like a criminal’s revenge, then seeming like maybe an ex-partner getting even, but eventually Rex is found on the roof of his apartment building, contemplating jumping off. Turns out he has been suffering from depression ever since his wife died a year ago that day, and he can’t see any reason to keep going. The team all try to help him, but what saves him is a very surprising confession from Gina that she was a suicidal teen and that what stopped her was wanting to know what happened next in the story of her life.

The B plot : While accompanying Captain Holt to an ex-lover’s wedding, Jake is hit on by a very attractive person and flirts rather outrageously with them, thinking nothing of it. But when he tells the people back at the precinct about it, a jealous-but-hiding-it Amy points out that said person could have been a dude. This launches Jake on a quest to find out the gender of this person he was attracted to when he doesn’t even know their name. Eventually, he finds the person, and sees them go into the lady’s room, and thinks that’s it, case closed. But then Amy reminds him about transsexuals, and then he has to track the person down again to find out if he was attracted to a dude or not. Turns out, he was not. It was a chick. But she’s a lesbian, and married.

The C plot : Hitchcock and Scully try to save their all time favorite pizza place from the wrecking ball before realizing the guy who owns it just wants to retire.

Well that wasn’t too bad. Turns out that once I get going, the ideas come pretty fast. I can’t afford to get too smug about it – have to retain my edge, after all – but I am beginning to think I might just be good at this whole writing thing. and it’s so much fun when nobody is forcing you to writing boring bullshit.

Went to see The Secret Life Of Pets with William yesterday. It was fab. The plot is highly original – I seriously had no idea what was going to happen next in the best possible way. The script was full of wit and warmth and wonder, and of course, oodles and oodles of cuteness and charm. The voice acting is great and the cast of characters is huge without ever feeling like there’s just too many people to keep track of. There were times when the 3D was used to great effect without it seeming blatant. Even the soundtrack was great.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it almost as much as Zootopia, and coming from me, that’s high praise indeed. I really feel like we might just be entering a golden era of animated features where the ones that are good are also doing really well at the box office, and so for a magical time, the money people may just leave the artists who know what they’re doing alone.

It’s especially amazing to jaded old me that they are making movies I love today. I try my best to be future-oriented (after all, the future is the only thing we have control over) but there is a part of me that still feels like all the really great stuff is in my past now and everything new will always seem a little off and wrong to me.

I could like it just fine, but always with a hint of patronizing indulgence. Oh yes, that’s very good… considering.

But not any more! And I could not be more pleased about that. I have seen some movies lately that have been awesome without any qualifiers. And that gives me hope.

And hope is a very precious thing for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.