Really feeling the ticking of the clock.

It’s not like I am falling behind. I’m not. I have Tuesday’s class covered, and I have tomorrow off, so I have all day to work on the assignments for Wednesday’s classes.

That means I need a sketch for Sketch and two TV spec pitches. I haven’t started either of those, so it should be a full day’s work. But I am great at Sketch, as long as I don’t put too my pressure on myself and end up freaking myself out about it, and the two pitches will require a lot of thinking but not a lot of work per se.

One of my pitches will be for Bob’s Burgers. All I know right now is that it’s going to be an episode centered on the kids, as follows :

A plotline : Louise learns a lesson about her own capacity for deep compassion
B plotline : Gene gets a new girlfriend
C plotline : Tina tries something new

So I kind of have a lot of blanks to fill there.

The other will be for Brooklyn 99, and I got zero ideas there. I should probably watch a couple of episodes so I can get back into the groove of the show.

Today, though, I will not be getting any schoolwork done. Today is my day off. I will be leaving at 3 pm to meet William at the Marine Drive Skytrain station so he can take me to go see The Secret Life of Pets. The trailers make it look hilarious and like it will be tons of fun. And after that, we will come back to the apartment then go to dinner with La Gang, as is our custom on Sunday nights.

I read something interesting recently that touched on things I already knew but clarified them into a useful tool. The idea is very simple : instead of trying to calm yourself down when you are feeling anxious, convert that anxiety into excitement simple by saying “I am excited. ”

Excitement and anxiety are basically the same thing physiologically : faster respiration and heartbeat, pupil dilation, increased perspiration, and all those other factors indicative of an adrenalized state of physiological arousal. The difference is in polarity : anxiety is a negative and painful state whereas excitement is fun and energizing and, well…. exciting!

And switching polarities of interpretation is a far more realistic goal than trying to force your body to go all the way from aroused to calm. That’s why it is futile to tell someone who is feeling anxious to calm down. If they are already anxious, that means their bloodstream is full of adrenaline and stimulation of any sort will simply increase their arousal state, let alone someone telling them to do the exact opposite of what their endocrine state is telling them to do.

At the very least, you have to include positive, grounding, soothing emotional signals in your request for calmness. This includes being warmly calm (but not detached!) yourself, speaking in a gentle but firm tone, and offering plausible reassurances.

I am guessing telling them to say “I am excited!” would not necessarily help either. As my dear friend and mental tag team partner Felicity said, if what the person is anxious about is something with a potentially positive outcome, like say having to give that big presentation, then saying “I am excited to be giving this presentation!” may well work. But if it’s something entirely negative, like say you’re worried about a lump you just discovered in your breast, then saying “I am excited about this lump in my breast!” probably won’t help.

Still, I think it will prove to be a valuable technique. I have been pondering the subject for some time, just phrased a little differently. I wanted to learn how to surf the wave of arousal, to turn the anxiety into energy and motivation pushing me forward in a positive and happy way towards my goals, or just having fun.

Potato, potahto. Amounts to the same thing. It’s a matter of refocusing the energy into something positive. Learning to view the future as someplace you are eager to go, as eager as a child waiting for Santa Claus. Depression inculcates a habit of never looking at the future because the depression makes it seem like the future can only be far, far worse than the present. So you stop looking in order to preserve what motivation you have.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The future can look bright and promising if you can shift your perspective.

And part of that is learning, little by little, to let your energies flow. To get in touch with your id and thus your own motive force. To learn to trust your instincts sometimes and end that poisonous inner fascist regime that insists in being in “austerity mode” all the time.

Austerity is bullshit. it doesn’t work, not for people and not for economies. It’s suitable only for people who can think no further than “We have offended The Economy, and must appease it through self-denial and the mortification of the flesh! Your flesh, that is… don’t dare expect ME to sacrifice anything. ”

The id can be scary, true. And not easy to deal with, especially when you have been starving it and ignoring it for a long time. Depression teaches you to associate the id only with the powerful negative emotions, like rage and fear, that it contains and to seek solace only in depression’s chilly embrace.

But I would rather deal with real negative emotions, no matter how strong, how messy, or how radical they are, than to suffer forever in the icy prison of a sad and idless existence. Depression has its charms but the price is far too high. Better to be fully alive and dealing with life.

And eventually, long down the road, you might even learn to concentrate on the positive things in life and live your life from peak to peak instead of from valley to valley.

At least, that’s what I hope to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And nothing without.

That is the whole entirety of sexual ethics in a simple, logical form. Everything with consent, nothing without. That is it. Whatever it is whatever number of people want to do in the privacy of their own whatever^[1] is perfectly fine as long as everyone is consenting and having a good time however they define it.

Everything else is bullshit, suitable only for those who lack the wit to separate their morality from their disgust reaction. The fact that you find a certain sex act to be disgusting or disturbing – even when an objective case could be made for that – does not actually give you the right to have any opinion whatsoever about whether people should do it or not.

One of the simplest definitions of a certain brand of intolerance as a psychological phenomenon is the inability to live with the fact that something even exists. Even if it is simplicity itself to avoid actual exposure to the thing, the intolerant person is so hounded by the mere thought of it that they feel justified in wanting it destroyed, or at least tightly contained.

So the debate always comes down to something like this :

Don’t like it? Don’t look for it.
Don’t want to see it? Don’t go looking for it.
Don’t want to watch it? Turn the channel.
Don’t like the sound of it? Don’t listen to it.
Don’t like the taste of it? Don’t eat it.

Personally, I loathe olives. But that doesn’t make me want to destroy or restrict them. That would be extremely immature. Intolerance is always a sign of an immature mind which lacks the metacognitive capacity to avoid thinking about something.

It all comes down to metacognition in the end.

Back to the subject at hand. Consent seems like a very simple idea, and most of the time it is. But there are potential grey areas.

Like coercion. For the purposes of fairness, we have to assume that if someone indicates consent through words and action, they are consenting. Maybe they feel coerced into having sex, but unless they make some kind of indication to their partner that they do not want to do this, and the signals are unclear or unreliable enough to allow for misinterpretation, we have to assume consent has been given.

After all, the other participant(s) cannot be expected to read minds. They can only go by what they see.

Relatedly, there is no such thing as “retroactive rape”. Consent is a realtime thing, and cannot be retroactively withdrawn. No matter how someone feels about the sexual encounter afterwards, if they consented at the time, then it was not rape, sexual assault, or whatever you want to call it.

Then we have age-related issues. The phrase “age of consent” has always stuck in my craw a little. I understand why, in order to formulate the highly necessary laws/rules against adult/child sex in this modern and tolerant era, it is necessary to construct a somewhat artificial notion that people below a certain age “cannot consent”.

But it’s clearly untrue, at least in the literal sense of the word. Clearly, a teen or child can consent to things. In fact, they often make it very, very clear what they want to do and what they don’t. They are perfectly capable of the emotion and intention of consent or lack thereof.

What we really mean is that we don’t think they can make certain decisions for themselves. Obviously, children and even teenagers cannot be allowed to make important decisions like sex or voting or driving a car or entering into contracts on their own because they lack the mental faculties to truly understand what it all means, and the younger they are, the less we can make them responsible for their decisions.

I mean, we don’t even let little kids decide when to cross the street, for Christ’s sake.

But in some cases, we let parents make decisions for the child/teen. Sure, no amount of parent consent would be sufficient to allow an eight year old to sign contracts, join the military, or legally drive a car. But virtually all other decisions are made by parents.

Parents can, essentially, consent for the child. In fact, we accept this surrogate consent in all conditions where an individual is considered non compis mentis and thus not capable of consent, whether it’d ebcause they are too young, adult but not possessing an adult IQ, mentally ill, senile, unconscious, or otherwise mentally compromised.

So it’s really a cognitive issue. Without ever giving it a scientifically precise definition, a level of mental acuity and cohesiveness is required for consent to count. Without that, you can get all the seeming consent that you want and it doesn’t matter diddly because the individual is not considered capable of informed consent.

The most curious case of concern for consent is bestiality. Sex with animals disgusts people, especially those in the modern world, largely because most of the exposure a modern city-dwelling human has with animals is via pets and pets arouse our nurturing instincts in much the same way children do. So on a gut level, bestiality is pseudo-pedophilia.

Thus, we have the rather unusual notion that we can justify modern laws against bestiality because of the animal’s inability to give consent. This works both on the emotional and intellectual levels. On the emotional side, it is in line without our thoughts (and instincts) on children, and intellectually, it is in line with the cognitive definition of consent.

The problem is that ask animal’s consent for precious little else. Most of us are carnivores, and it’s hard to imagine that the animal wanted to die. We spay or neuter our pets. We make animals do work for us. We make them follow human rules without asking them beforehand. We can do virtually anything to an animal entirely for our own pleasure, and it’s legal as long as it’s not “cruel”.

Just not sex. Why?

Because it grosses us out, that’s why.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You can’t hate yourself for all your flaws if you would not hate someone else with those same flaws.

I’m fat. But I don’t hate people for being fat.
I’m clumsy and uncoordinated. But I don’t hate people for being clumsy and uncoordinated.
I’m very absentminded. But I don’t hate people for being absentminded.
I wouldn’t even hate someone for being fat, clumsy, uncoordinated, and absentminded.

I don’t like any of those three things about myself. When I hate myself, those are the top three justifications for it.

But I don’t hate others for being that way. So why should I hate myself for it? What makes the rules different for me?

Mental exercise time. Think of all the things you hate about yourself. Dig deep. Get to the really nasty stuff. Then…. imagine another person with all those same attributes.

Do you hate them for it? Why or why not?

Of course, the answer to the question of why the rules are different for yourself is not to be found in logic. The position is logically inconsistent. The real reason is not logical, it’s chemical. A chemical imbalance is pulling your mind toward the negative and distorting your perceptions.

And there’s no system of logic in the world that can give you accurate results when the basic data is corrupted. Despite what certain “rationalist” philosophers say, everything in the human mind begins with perception, and if the perceptions are flawed, the rest of the system is useless.

Instead, the depressed create elaborate (but flimsy) logical justifications for the self-loathing being forced upon them by their chemical disorder. This satisfies the bare minimum requirements of logic, or rather, the feeling of logic. Actual logic would destroy these justifications, and that cannot be allowed.

Because the one thing that the human mind cannot tolerate is the knowledge that its perceptions are inaccurate. Without perceptions, there is nothing. The entire structure of our consciousness rests on the belief that things are how we perceive them.

If the justifications were to disappear, then you would be left with emotions with no justification, and that is a deeply terrifying thought. As human being, we need to believe in cause and effect. Unjustified emotion would be an effect with no cause. So we make up explanations.

Myself, I can accept that my perceptions are distorted and that things aren’t always how they feel, but that doesn’t solve anything because no matter what I know, my perceptions are what I have to work with. In this, I am no different than any other form of lunatic. The psychotic may well know that there isn’t a demon waiting for it outside, but it’s still very difficult not to believe there is.

That’s where metacognition comes in. One definition for metacognition is that it is the part of your mind that monitors the rest of the mind and checks for errors. If, for example, you were trying to remember when your next dentist’s appointment is, and you think it’s the 15th, but a part of your mind says “No, it’s the 16th, because of this”, that part is your metacognition.

But it is my belief that metacognition requires an above average level of intelligence, and possibly the “emotional off switch” that allows us to NOT act on emotion that often accompanies it. For the average person, metacognition exists but is not, I suspect, strong enough to resist a very strong perception, one with a great deal of emotion attached to it.

Thus, people, by and large, believe the world to be exactly how they feel it is. The feelings lead and logic provides the justifications. To ask a person of average intelligence to disbelieve their perceptions may be unfair.

Instead you have to change that perception, and for that, you have to change the emotion from which it stems. That’s why any attempt at persuasion that relies solely on logic is doomed to failure. You have to reach people’s emotions directly, and change how they feel. Only then will they be ready to change how they think.

Of course, I am not claiming we smart types are immune to going where emotion leads us and making up the justification later. I am just saying we stand a better chance of resisting it some of the time.

So if you hate yourself (hey look, it’s the topic!), you will invent reasons why it is justified. It is a delicate thing to undo these reasons. It can’t be done all at once – or at least, it can’t for someone like me, who lacks the capacity for transformation of that sort – but you can get there.

You just have to be willing to separate your identity from your depression. This is the necessary first step, and it is the hardest. You are not a depressed person – you are a person currently suffering from depression. It no more defines you than a broken leg would. You were you before you became depressed, and you will still be you when it has gone. There is nothing to fear.

Once you can do that, or at least start down that road, you will be able to attack your depression without it feeling like you are attacking yourself – like you are trying to rip off your own arm. That means that you have bypassed its most powerful defense, because the human mind cannot interpret an attack on identify as anything other than an attempt at assassination.

Identity death is the only real death, after all.

Others will be free to attack your depression as well, if you let them. This is harder than the first step because we interpret disagreement as an attack on identity anyhow. But once you make the separation, you can learn to hate your depression, and turn your rage on it.

I hate my own depression. It destroy my prime adult years and left me trying to get my life started at 43. As far as I am concerned, it’s dead tissue, and the sooner I can get rid of it, the better. I will not defend it or its justifications and excuses. It’s a very wrong path, and I now recognize it and its ways and can make better choices, the exact choices it doesn’t want.

In fact, if my depression tells me not to do something, that’s a damned good reason to do it. Every time I overcome it, it dies a little.

Eventually, it will all be gone…. and only the real me will remain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Things are moving a tad more quickly lately.

It started when I realized that a) my “do one assignment a night” strategy was not going to keep up with my workload this week and b) I will have less time than usual because of various social activities over the weekend. This is causing me to freak out a little.

As a result, I am going to try to do as many of the harder seeming assignments as I can tonight to try to get ahead of the game.

One of them is going to be the beat sheet for my feature film, and I am not looking forward to that, because I know how my movie starts and I know how it ends, but the middle is wide open. I know I want my heroine to need to visit various social groups in her high school in order to solve the mystery of the battered bully, and that as she does so she will get further and further from her comfort zone (and learn more and more about how people judge people by reputation and end up hating the people everyone else hates without any direct evidence) until she reaches the home of the kid everyone thinks did it, where she will confront him, the nature of prejudice, the fact that some people have lives radically different than her own, and the fact that the things “everyone knows” can’t always be trust.

But plotting that out beat by beat will be tough. As you may have deduced a “beat” in this context means a single “thing” that happens in the movie.

Like a beat sheet for Star Wars might go like this :
1. Two droids escape to Tatooine with valuable information
2. Luke Skywalker lives with his aunt and uncle who raised him, and hates it there
3. Luke Skywalker buys a pair of droids
4. Luke Skywalker goes to see the mysterious Ben Kenobi
5. Luke learns Darth Vader killed his father
6. Luke returns to find the Empire has killed the aunt and uncle that raised him

And so forth and so on.

The standard formula for a film following the Three Act Structure formula is seven beats for the first act, fourteen for the second act, and five for the third. That’s because the middle act is where most of the action takes place. The first act is setup and the third act is the conclusion. The middle act is where everything else happens.

And this will be the first one of those I have ever written. They are, by all accounts, the toughest part of screenwriting. Beginnings and conclusions are easy. Middles are hard.

And yet, if you went straight from setup to conclusion, the movie would be extremely unsatisfying.

ACT 1 – The Beginning
Hero : You killed my master! HE WILL BE AVENGED!
(fade to black)

(fade in from black)
ACT 3 – The Final Battkle
Hero : Wow, what an amazing adventure!

You would want your money back pronto, plus punitive damages, I would think.

Today was decent. It was a relief to find out that I didn’t have homework in either of the classes I took today, Feature Development and Writing for Animation. It soothed my entirely justifiable paranoia about missing things, and means that I am now, as far as I know, completely up to date in my little calendar app.

I did my Feature Development time last week, so today, it was all about feedback on other people’s movies. I felt a little impatient but for the most part, I like workshopping. I’ve never been in a situation before where I could contribute as part of a team. It’s taking some adjusting to get into the groove of it and I am still not all the way there. My incredibly strong urge to talk has to be kept in check and I have to learn to view my contributions as mere possibilities and not worry about how well they go over or whether my suggestions are followed or not.

I’m just one node of the group mind, and together, we makes people’s movies better.

Like I have said many times before in this space, I have a huge problem with letting my identity be subsumed into a group identity. It actually makes me feel like I will die. As if my identity is so fragile that any participation in group identity will completely overwrite it.

Maybe in the past – I have gone through some very dark times – but not now. I don’t need to identify with my own solitude any more. I know that part of me is still that scared little animal, filled with fear and anger and ready to gut the first motherfucker who comes too close. Like a cornered rat.

And that’s the part of me with whom I must negotiate if I want to get closer to others. And it might be a long time before I can talk it out of its tree and get it where I can give it the love and safety it needs so badly. I want to be able to rescue it, but at the moment, I don’t know how.

I guess I will have to feel my way through it.

Today, I relaxed somewhat at lunch, and you know what? Things went way better. I spoke without thinking, or rather without the twenty step verification process that usually has to complete before I feel like it safe to say what it on my mind. And nothing bad happened! In fact, it turns out that I am even funnier and way less socially weird when I just calm the fuck down, stop trying to control outcomes with the power of my mind, and let things flow naturally.

I will try to take this lesson to heart and learn it deeply. It goes against an enormous percentage of that I have thought about the world for a long time, so it might not take.

But the truth is, I want to grow up. I want to get over my mental blocks. I want to become a real little boy.

I want to be alive, instead a member of the walking dead.

I need to resurrect myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So here are the desk jokes I wrote for today’s Sketch class.

They’re all about Brexit.

1. On June 23, the UK officially voted to leave the EU in a move that the media dubbed Brexit, although a better name might have been “Brarmageddon”.

2. In media interview, many of the people who voted to leave the EU expressed surprise that they had won. They were also surprised to learn that water is wet, that the sky is blue, and that swallowing thumbtacks gives your tummy an owie.

3. The people voting to Leave has such faith that other people would step in and stop them that none of them even bothered to come up with a plan for actually doing it. But other than that, it was a great idea.

4. Prime Minister David Cameron, who swore that he wouldn’t resign if the Leave vote won, announced his resignation the moment the Leave vote one. This continues the proud Conservative tradition of breaking things then running away.

5. Boris Johnson, former Mayor of London and chief spokesman for the Leave vote, says that it was the Prime Minister’s office’s job to come up with a plan for the UK leaving the EU. This is akin to saying “Look, you knew I was drunk, so you should have been ready with a bucket. “

6. Prime Minister David Cameron, on his part, says that it was Boris Johnson’s job to come up with the plan, thus turning the whole of British Tory politics into a game of “Who farted?”

7. Meanwhile, across the aisle, the British Labour Party has taken full advantage of the chaotic state of Tory politics by also descending into petty factionalist bickering. Reporters asked a group of kindergarten toddlers experiencing a massive sugar crash to comment. The kids said, “Those guys really need to get over themselves and grow up. “

8. News of the Leave vote’s victory immediately sent the British economy into a tailspin, with a plunging pound and plummeting stock prices causing 2 trillion dollars to disappear from the British economy overnight. Sources close to the economy said that the money’s last words before it disappeared were “Fuck these people… I’m outta here. “

9. It turns out that the second most common Google search coming from Britain around this time “What is the EU?”… especially on the day AFTER the vote. This is kind of like waiting until your car is on fire and going over a cliff before reading the owner’s manual.

10. And finally, probably the most amazing post-Brexit revelation is that a large number of the people who voted “Leave” thought it meant “Make the immigrants leave”. Or at least, that’s what they are saying NOW. Apparently, they would rather people think they were stupid racists rather than people so stupid that they couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight.

They went over okay. Not as well as I would have liked, but then again, I am a hyper neurotic comedy writer who could have gotten gales of laughter for every joke and still doubted himself. We only got to do three of our ten jokes in class due to time constraints. I chose 1, 2, and 5, because they all ended on a nice, juicy, punchy word.

But nobody got “Brarmageddon”… in retrospect, it was probably not the joke for an audience two thirds of whom have English as a second language.

I bet Stephen Colbert could have made it work, though.

Number 2, the “owie” joke, got a laugh…. but it came after “water is wet”, which threw me off. The rest of it could not compete. Still, a pause after each item would have done wonders. I supposed that’s the sort of thing that you can only learn via experience.

And Number 5, the “bucket” joke, went over the heads of the students, and the teacher just shook her head sadly and said “Yes, it’s true. ”

Oh well. I am not, technically, a comedian, and I think all the jokes were pretty well written, if I do say so my self. And I do. It was just a matter of timing, delivery, and knowing your audience.

Plus, due to a radical mismanagement of time, I did not have time to go over them and tighten them up last night, like I had planned. So those are basically first draft jokes.

I think it should be obvious that I didn’t even have time to proofread. D’oh.

Oh well, the desk joke phase is over and for next week’s class, I get to write an actual skit. That is where I will really shine. I am sure I can come up with something brilliant, and I will write it specifically with the fact that it will be acted out by my classmates in mind. So, no props, simple action, one location…. pretty much a super cheap one act play.

So basically, a conversation. That’s fine, I am great at conversations. Come to think of it, I also have to do a two page dialogue for next week. I wonder if I could get away with submitting the same thing for each assignment?

Probably not. I am positive one of my classmates would say something about it, out of surprise if nothing else. And even if I did, technically get away with it by arguing that there’s no rule saying each assignment has to be for one class only, it would just makes people resent the fuck out of me and then they would be eager to, you guessed it, take me down a peg.

And that’s not easy to do. Partly it’s because I am gifted, partly it’s because I have a certain mental maneuverability that makes me hard to touch, let alone pin down, but mostly it’s due to being so socially oblivious and unconcerned with status and such that even if someone completely defeats me in some way, I would just smiles, concede victory, congratulate the victor, and go on my merry way without seeming even the slightest bit put out.

Even if the loss actually hurt me… like, for say, I lost in a comedy setting… I would still behave the same way. In that case, though, it would be more about not letting them see that they got to you. And I am not super great at hiding my emotions, so they would probably figure it out, and get some satisfaction that way.

Whatever. Life’s too short for all that status bullshit. I just want to have fun working hard at something I enjoy.

Plus, when I have to compete, I am an honest competitor. I don’t cheat and I accept defeat gracefully. To a true warrior (of words), the best thing is always victory, but the second best thing is defeat at the hands of a worthy adversary.

After all, that’s when you learn the most.

Because of my imperfect performance at being hilarious today, I had a certain amount of depression and self-doubt to deal with.^[1] I wondered if I was really funny, I wondered if I could do the job I am training for, and so on. But that’s just another day in paradise for me. My confidence has already (mostly) returned.

One of the other things we were supposed to do for Sketch class today was “watch some sketch comedy”. Uh, yeah. That would be totally redundant for me. I have seen more sketch comedy than the other students have watched all of television. I have so many skits in my head that I could do the same exercise (tells us about a skit that made you laughed or that you hated) every day for a year and not run out. And I am absurdly capable of explaining, in excruciating detail, exactly why I like it or hate it. Ad nauseum ad infinitum!

All in all, it was a pretty good day. I resisted the urge to buy lunch on the way home like I did yesterday. It’s a FRED week, and that means I have two dinners to pay for. Plus lunch tomorrow, for tomorrow is a full day. Class in the morning and the afternoon.

It did not take long for full days, which were the norm last term, to suddenly seem onerous and unwelcome this term.

God damn I’m lazy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And yet, the world has so many of them.

All my life, I have been uncategorizable. Even when I was subjected to a whole battery of tests^[1] designed to help the school system in general and my teachers specifically figure out just what the fuck I was and what was going on in that extraordinary little mind of mine, the results puzzled people. I overheard my teacher at the time, Mrs. Arsenault, talking with the very nice nun that did the special testing and such for our school district, and the gist of it was that they were trying to compare notes and make some sense of me.

It didn’t work. I wonder if they would have an easier time of it today.

And the thing is, people don’t like people who don’t fit into boxes and to whom labels simply do not stick. People need their boxes in order to reduce the amount of information they need to process about a person to something they can manage. They need shortcuts like stereotypes and labels in order to change you from an individual to a series of generalities.

This is not malicious. You have probably done that with everybody you do not know well, and they have done it to you. It’s not that we don’t recognize the individuality of acquaintances. It’s that there is only so much room for information about people who are not close to you in our minds. Hence, shortcuts.

And I just plain don’t fit. As far as I can tell, I am almost always the first person like me that most people have ever met. In fact, it’s entirely possible that I am the only person like me in the world. And I suppose if I were some kind of rugged individualist, I would take great comfort and pride in that.

But to me, it just seems very, very lonely.

That’s why I have always identified with the old saying “it’s lonely at the top”.

Because it is.

And that is diametrically opposed to my desire to belong and be a part of things. I have felt excluded for as long as I can remember. And I can’t really tell how much of that is me and how much of that is the world simply not being able to handle me.

But I honestly don’t want to be on a totally different wavelength (hell, a totally different form of radio entirely) than everyone else. It is not something I would choose for myself. I want to be able to connect with others and not be so goddamned alone inside all the time.

For that, I need to keep on melting the ice around my heart.

And maybe learn to accept the idea of superiority at least a little. It might well be that I would get along with others more easily if I simply accepted that I am mentally superior^[2] to most people and concentrated on being the best genius I can be, instead of stumbling around trying to pretend I am just another dude.

The thing is, when I try thinking along those lines, the best I can come up with is thinking of average people as basically being children. I can’t think of a better way to accept that I am qualitatively smarter than the average person. I know that sounds wrong, and I definitely feel like there must be a way to be smarter-but-equal, but if there is, I can’t see it. And seeing them as children is, for me, highly benevolent. I love kids and want only what is best for them.

And it’s a hell of a lot better than other populations, such as thinking of people as idiots, evil, inferior, or otherwise unworthy and subhuman.

I would not, of course, openly treat any adult like a child. ^[3] That would be awful, not to mention a very quick way to make people hate my guts. This would be the sort of thing that is only going on in my head, and it would be a way of facing the reality of my mental status while remaining well disposed towards people.

A curious thing happened in Dialogue class today. We had been tasked with writing a one page dialogue, no actions, no props, no lines longer than fifteen words. And (after a dash to print it out after realizing I was supposed to bring a hard copy) I handed mine in, and we went through them in class.

And when mine came up, the teacher did not find there to be a lot wrong with it… and this seemed to disappoint and depress him. He did point out a bunch of places where there were unnecessary words, which I loved, because I am looking to learn to trim the fat on my writing and make it stronger and clearer.

But otherwise, he seemed upset that he couldn’t find more wrong with it.

It’s not the first time I have gotten that kind of reaction. I have to admit, it seems like jealousy to me, as Ayn Rand as that sounds. Maybe he was looking forward to taking me down a peg. Maybe he enjoys being the tough scary Dialogue teacher who makes people go rewrite things until they are good enough. Maybe he doesn’t like not being in the safely superior position over his students.

That was what it was like with the aforementioned Mrs. Arsenault. She viewed my being both highly intelligent and highly independent as a threat, and was always looking for some way to take me down a peg.

But I just floated along like an innocent little cloud, untouchable, and I think that pissed her off even more.

Serves her right, the venomous evil Nana Mouskuri-looking bitch.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So today in TV Spec class, we watched an episode of Big Bang Theory.

And it wasn’t that bad. Some parts were genuinely funny, even. There was this B plot about Howard’s first few days of astronaut training that was hilarious.

But mostly what made it tolerable was that the plot did not revolve around the usual suspects dealing with Sheldon’s irrational dickishness. That is most of what I find unpleasant about the show. Usually when I try to watch the show, I sit there wishing Leonard would stand up to Sheldon, preferably in a manner which is both sudden and violent.

Anyhow, after the episode, we broke into groups, with each group having to come up with a broad-strokes pitch for an episode of the show.

And I had what I thought would make an excellent Sheldon plotline. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if, while visiting someone in the hospital, the fussy and germ-phobic Sheldon got stuck in an elevator with a man who very quickly becomes very sick. A man who rapidly becomes so sick that he can’t even tell Sheldon what is wrong with him. This, of course, drives Sheldon nuts because he doesn’t know if the man is sick with something he can catch or not.

For most of the episode, Sheldon stays as far from the sick man as he can get in the confines of the elevator. But near the end of the episode, it becomes crystal clear to Sheldon that this man is going to die unless someone does something, and Sheldon is the only one present, so he has to do it himself. He does whatever gross thing that has to be done, and saves the man’s life, is hailed as a hero once the elevator is working again, and had grown a little as a person.

In the final scene, Sheldon would be just finishing telling Leonard about what happened, and Leonard would say, “That’s great, Sheldon! I’m really proud of you!”.

And Sheldon would reply, “Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take a thousand showers. ”

Pretty good stuff, right? and yet, when I pitched that idea to the group, first there was those deadly moments of silence when people are staring at me completely dumbfounded by what I just said for reasons I do not at all understand, before rejecting the idea outright, saying “But Sheldon wouldn’t do that!”.

You know, completely ignoring the fact that the whole idea is that it creates a situation in which Sheldon actually has to grow up a little and get over himself. Sheldon might be a dick a lot of the time, but even he would not be able to live with himself if he let someone die right in front of him. I picture him getting instructions from a doctor over the elevator phone, and the doctor getting exasperated with how difficult Sheldon is, but plowing on because it’s the only way to save his patient.

So what am I doing wrong? Why is it I just can’t come across to people? Why do I keep ending up getting stared at like cows staring at a passing train by people who have no idea what the fuck I’m on about? Am I lacking a critical component of theory of mind?

Because the things I say make perfect sense to me. So it must be something I don’t get about how other people process information. To me, my thoughts and ideas are not that different from the things other people say. But that is obviously not the case given my starkly different results.

The obvious answer to why this keeps happening is intelligence. I am way smarter than most people, and so me relating to them is like trying to teach algebra to a cranky toddler. And while I absolutely loathe this idea, I can’t discount it out of hand. I don’t want to to be true because, for one thing, it would make me feel a hell of a lot lonelier than I do now, because it would be the final proof that I simply can’t relate to most people and I will never socially integrate, ever, because of it.

This would mean that all my strange attempts to get along were doomed from the start, which is a pretty fucking depressing thought.

But I recognize my own role in this. In a sense, I create these adverse conditions by refusing to hide my intelligence, “dumb down”, or pretend I am dumber than I am. There’s a certain nobility to that, but the cost may well be far too high. It is, deep down, a fairly childish attitude.

So is another obstacle, which is my constant need to show off how smart I am. Those two are intimately linked, obviously. I can’t pretend to be dumber than I am precisely because of this overwhelming desire to show off how smart I am and get approval that way.

And it’s not just a desire to show off – it’s also a very need to express my intelligence. I need to use this mighty mental muscle of mine, and I also have the deep need to communicate (coupled with crippling shyness) that makes someone a writer. So I use my intelligence to communicate.

Except it doesn’t work. But I keep trying anyhow.

So I am seriously re-thinking the entire question of my role in life. It might well be that the truth is that I can’t relate to most people as equals, despite that being what I want the most. I might have to take roles of authority simply to bridge the gap between me and others. It wouldn’t let me relate to them as equals, of course… but it would at least let me relate to them.

It’s either that, or I am going to have to except that I have to choose between being who I am to the hilt and actually learning to get along with people by being a tad more flexible.

I don’t like the idea of compromising my integrity like that…. but what use is integrity if you’re all alone in life?

There has to be an acceptable middle ground.

I keep saying that, don’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Currently stuck in my head :

Especially that sweet electric piano riff right before the lyrics start.

I love a lot of things about that song. I love it’s wholesome peaceful vibe. That’s one of the things the Seventies had that I really miss. There was this marvelous sense that people of peace and goodwill could get together and live in harmony with each other and the land and make something better than modern society. Something that would better suit the true nature of humanity.

That’s what a lot of the Seventies agrarianism was about. Getting in touch with nature and the soil and the processes of life itself. I have said before that every animal knows and loves its own habitat, which is what helps keep it in the areas for which it has evolved. I think that’s where our desire to make contact with nature comes from. Modern civilization creates modern citizens, and for the most part, we adapt well to our urban jungles.

But it’s not a perfect adaptation. There is still a part of us that longs for our natural habitat. Often it operates well below the conscious level, as modern society (at least in the West^[1]) doesn’t give us any frame of reference for these feelings of displacement and wrongness, so we suppress them.

The signs (hah) are all around us, though. Why else would we be so fond of trees and lawns? Our ancestors started in the trees and then moved into the grasslands of the Savannah. So both trees and grass appeal to our habitat instincts. Not only that, but trees make us feel safe, because our monkey instincts associate trees with the ability to escape ground based predators when necessary.

We love trees and lawns so much that neighborhoods with plenty of both always have higher property values. That’s because they feel more “like home”. Wholesome. Natural. Good.

I was lucky enough to grow up on one of the nicest streets in Summerside, Belmont Street, which had loads of horse chestnut trees and lawns and other greenery. The whole neighborhood was like that, to a certain extent. Back then, it was of course merely normal. But looking back, and comparing it to some of the depressingly sterile neighborhoods I’ve seen, I feel like I lucked out on that score.

I mean… imagine a typical suburban neighborhood. Now take away all the trees and grass. Where there was lawn, there’s only pavement. Where there were trees there is now only cell phone towers. No bushes, no shrubs, no birdsong, no dogs barking, no kids playing in the street. Nothing alive. And all the houses are grey slabs of concrete.

Sounds pretty fucking depressing, doesn’t it?

Another thing I like about the song is its left-wing Christianity. First in an angry way, shouting at the “All trespassers will be shot on sight” people “man, you’re some kind of sinner!”. That gives me the same warm feeling that I get when I watch A Christmas Carol and one of the spirits (Marley, I think) calls Scrooge a “greedy old sinner”. Whatever happened to that brand of Christianity? The kind that viewed wrath and greed as sins, and was willing to call out both aggressive rednecks and money-grubbing rich people for the anti-Christian degenerates they were?

Remember, usury used to be considered a sin. And you know what usury means? Charging interest on a debt.

Imagine a world where that kind of Christianity had been the kind that took hold and stayed alive into the modern age. A Christianity where refusing to help those in need was considered a terrible sin, where people did their best to live by Jesus’ exhortations to love thy neighbor as thyself, to turn the other cheek, to be gentle and kind and humble and good, and to strive for forgiveness for both yourself and others, for we are all merely human.

I mean, what could be less Christian than the idea that you have the right to kill someone – shoot them DEAD – just because they are on your land without your permission?

The other left-wing Christian verse is the one with the note that says “Thank you lord for bringing me here… I’m alive, and doing fine!”. That, to me, expresses the kind of simple, humanist Christianity that makes sense to me. It’s not about a church, a set of rules, or any sort of “straight and narrow path”. It’s about that marvelously American idea of a close personal relationship with God with which no human agency can interfere.

This frees people’s idea of God to become whatever that person needs. That seems, to me, to be a lot healthier than dogma, which is suited only for people who hate any situation in which they have to make a decision. They want there to be an all encompassing ruleset that is always “right” and therefore only needs to be applied to situations.

That’s why you have people going around saying they are Biblical literalists who believe that every single word in the Bible is the word of God, despite a) the many ways in which the Bible contradicts itself, b) the parts of the Bible which are just plain horrible, c) the completely arbitrary nature of the document itself, being more or less just a bunch of random religious texts stapled together, and d) the extreme left wing bias of everything Christ said, like how you should sell everything you own and give it to the poor, and all that love thy neighbor crap.

They like the idea of the Bible as a perfect document with all the answers, but they value their simplistic concept of what it says (coincidentally exactly what they want it to say) to ever risk it by actually reading it.

Besides, reading is hard and the Bible is boring. Perfect and infallible, sure, but you know…. hard.

And when has religion been about telling people they have to do things they don’t want to do and that they are not allowed to do things they really want to do?

Everyone knows that the only thing religion is good for is defending your actions and attacking those of others without having to think too hard!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just watched a great documentary called Boom Bust Boom, and it’s made me want to write about what I learned from it in order to boost my chances of retaining it.

Here;s the trailer :

The first thing I want to get down is Minsky^[1]. Hyman Minsky was an economist – a real economist. He came up with the Financial Stability Hypothesis, which states that capitalist economies are inherently unstable due to the fact that during prosperous times, a speculative euphoria (what Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance”) takes hold in people, and they get whipped into a speculative frenzy where the financial side of the economy becomes bloated with cash and starts dismantling those pesky regulations (which are totally STUPID and only in place because the GOVERNMENT HATES MONEY) that limit the amount of risk they can take and the kind of people who they can con into taking on that risk themselves.

Every financial crisis, from the Great Depression, has been preceded by a vigorous call for deregulation (because without it, I would be making MORE MONEY and that’s all I can see) and a steep drop in what is known as the “cost of risk index”. Risk becomes too cheap, the price of whatever is the center of the frenzy gets pumped up in a completely artificial way, and eventually it all crashes.

The thing is, like all Ponzi schemes, they really work for a while. People put their money in and get more money out. It really seems, at least to people blinded by greed, that they have found the secret to unlimited wealth and they will violently shout down anyone like Minsky who dares to say that bubbles burst and that the whole thing is bound for disaster.

Then the bubble bursts, enormous financial devastation occurs, and all the traditional economists sit there blinking in shock like cartoon characters when a stick of dynamite goes off in their hand wondering what the hell happened and declaring that the entire thing was completely unpredictable and, you know, stuff happens.

That’s because of another thing that I learned from the movie : Economics is even stupider than I thought it was. All mainstream economists – that is, those who would rather achieve academic success than actually get things right – use as the basis of their theories an economic model that, get this, assumes people are all rational agents and do the rational thing all the time.

That is so gobsmackingly stupid that it buggers the mind to even try to imagine how this ever seemed like a good idea. I am pretty sure that a poll of the entire human race would reveal that 99.9 percent of humans agree with the statement “people are stupid sometimes”.

And yet world economies are being run by people who think it acceptable to completely ignore this fact in order to make their theories more elegant. Economics, I assume, is a field that attracts the sort of person who consider human behaviour to be unpredictable and feels that, therefore, they don’t have to take it into account. They can just live in their happy world of numbers where everything is rational, predictable, and does what it is told, and the thing is, these marching morons have convinced nearly the entire world that they are right.

We might as well be trying to run economies using numerology, for fuck’s sake. That’s all traditional economics is, in the end – a belief that all questions can be answered through crunching numbers.

Well you can crunch all the numbers you want (we’ll make more) but if your fundamental assumptions are wrong, it’s not going to do you a damned bit of good. You might as well just be rolling your “lucky dice” or consulting the I Ching. There is no possible manipulation of numbers that will turn bad numbers into good ones. All you can do is to make the whole thing so complicated that it impresses people into thinking you must be right.

Oh, and another thing that is an unfailing predictor of imminent financial meltdown is debt. The more debt an economy generates, the less stable it gets. And when you think about it, this makes total sense, because debt is not money. Debt is potential money. Maybe that debt will be paid, and maybe not. But the problems arise when debt is treated as actual money, and passed around like it’s the real thing.

And then the bubble bursts, people wake up to the fact that they have been building castles in the air(and mortgaging their real homes to do it) , and most of that debt evaporates because suddenly, nobody has any money to pay their debts.

And poof, billions of dollars disappear from the economy because they were never real or sane in the first place. Like faerie magic, they disappeared when people stopped believing in them, and a whole lot of people end up trying to sell what they bought when the price was high and now have no choice to sell now that the price is low.

Buy high, sell low has never been a successful financial strategy.

The injustice of it all, though, is that billions of people who had absolutely no part in this farce end up suffering the effects anyway. You wake up one morning to find the news telling you everything’s fucked and all those people what invest in them stocks and things are in a panic, and you’re just a working class Canadian with a spouse and kids and a high school education trying to make ends meet, and even though you know nothing about that entire world, you know for sure that somehow, you’re gonna be the one who gets screwed.

And what happens to the people who actually perpetrated this heinous act of lunacy and greed?

Absolutely nothing. Of course. They suffer no penalty and they even still get to be rich.

And that’s what has people so pissed off.

Can you blame them?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am getting worried about my feet. Walking shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

It’s because of my inability to find shoes that can survive me walking in them, I think. No matter what, the shoes quickly lose all semblance of arch support or any other support, and so it is like I am walking the mean streets of the GVRD in a very thin pair of slippers.

And that’s just plain bad for feet.

Plus I get a lot of weird pains and itches in my feet. And cramps. This suggests to me that they are in considerable distress. As you know, diabetic people tend to have foot issues. The disease interferes with blood circulation, and the blood vessels in your feet are particularly sensitive to that kind of thing, because they already have the tough job of keeping your blood flowing all through your feet when you basically standing on the arteries and veins.

And of course, for us type II diabetics, odds are we are morbidly obese, and that means we are putting way more weight on our feet than they are designed to bear. After all, when you get fatter, your feet don’t get bigger in order to compensate.

And to be honest, if my feet were big enough to spread the weight evenly like they are supposed to do, they would be the size of snowshoes.

Back when my life was sedentary to the point of me practically being an invalid, this issue didn’t come up a lot. I could get away with barely walking at all and almost never walking outside of the home. And part of me misses that…. but not really, because I know I was miserable back then and way happier now.

It’s just the kind of happiness that takes effort.

Trying to lead an effort-free life is quite poisonous to the mind and soul. Trust me, I know this all too well. Sure, I would like it if my life were easier. Who wouldn’t? But the key thing is that I am not going to use something being “too hard” or taking “too much effort” as an excuse to hide from the world any more.

Depression is made of excuses. Recovery delivers results.

Still, I ought to do something about my feet. My feet are still sore an hour after I take my shoes off after a day at school, sometimes more. And that is a very bad sign, methinks.

Speaking of school, getting the homework done this weekend. There was no grace period at all this term. Got homework in my very first class. Fine by me, gives me something to do besides sleep too much and play too much Fallout 4. And it’s all real writing, so I am happy about that. I am looking forward to having to produce more actual creative content, with rules and such. I want to stretch my abilities as a writer, but I know I damned well don’t have the self-discipline to make myself do it all alone.

So having the structured environment of school really helps. And after all, if I succeed in getting work in the TV industry, I will be expected to produce good pages quickly (TV is a madhouse!), and having to get homework done on time or it is worth nothing certainly trains one in that!

The most interesting, exciting, and terrifying bit of homework is having to come up with ten “desk jokes” for Sketch class. A “desk joke” is the sort of thing that talk show hosts do in their monologues and news parody shows do as fake news – the kind of joke that starts with a real news item, then ends with a snarky riff on it.

I have never written that kind of thing before. I am not really a “joke” type writer. I am not saying I can’t or won’t do it. I’m just saying that it will mean learning a whole new way of being funny, and that is going to take some serious effort.

When the time comes (probably tomorrow afternoon), I am going to sit down with my Facebook feed, write riffs on every news story I find for which I can think of something, and hopefully learn by doing. I am confident that I can do it… I certainly know how to riff. It’s just a matter of focusing down on turning that into jokes.

Still, I will be happy when we are writing actual skits. I have over one thousand skit ideas on file. I am not worried about the sketch part of things.

Oh, and our sketch class teacher assures us that there’s always a huge demand for good desk joke writers, so it’s a very good skill to develop. And I believe her. After all, there’s a lot of talk shows and other types of news-reaction type shows out there, and they have to come up with a ton of jokes five days a week.

Not sure I would want to make a career out of that kind of work. It doesn’t seem like it would be very rewarding, artistically speaking. But it would pay the bills.

What else… did my monologue from the point of view of the protagonist of the feature film I will be writing done. I know the character very well, so it wasn’t hard to do. I might need to rewrite it some, though. Technically, the assignment just wanted me to write something explaining her and her situation in her own unique voice, and I totally did that, but I think I will delete a few details in order to make room for more character reveals.

I also have to write a one page dialogue for dialogue class. I already took a stab at it, but I don’t like the result, so I am going to try again.

That’s a big step for me. Normally I would send it in the moment it was done and forget all about it. But this time… I will rewrite.

So yay for me! I am growing up as a writer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.