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.

How do you know that you are free? Free compared to what? Free based on what?

We tend to define freedom through options. More options, more freedom. But that’s a slippery slope. After all, if someone lived in a totally fascist state which happened to offer a hundred different flavours of gruel, we would not think them free. So it is clear that freedom is not a matter of mere quantity of choices.

Another way of defining it is autonomy. The freedom to do what one pleases without interference from others. This seems like a more solid way to define freedom, but it too has its flaws. We consider ourselves free in the modern world, and yet we certainly can’t say we are free to do whatever we want. Most of us are severely limited by finances, ability, location, education, and many other factors as to what we actually can do at any moment.

If I decided that I wanted to buy a car, I couldn’t. I don’t have the money.
If I decided that I wanted to draw a picture of a galloping horse, I couldn’t. I don’t have the ability.
If I decided that I wanted to go to New Delhi in half an hour, I couldn’t. I’, too far away.
If I decided I wanted to give a lecture on the history of French Colonial Africa, I couldn’t. I don’t have the education.

And so forth and so on. The best we can say is that we have the freedom to do what we want within those strict limitations. But how, then, is that different from being a sheep free to stand in its stall however it likes? To sway to the left OR to the right? Are we really so much freer than that?

Maybe we’re no different from those docile cheep in their tiny stalls. Maybe we are merely sheep who are kept in line by being raised to believe that the walls of the stall are the limits of reality, and that makes the thought of life outside these limitations unthinkable. Perhaps our cacophony of options is there to convince us that we are free, when in reality, our lives are as limited and proscribed as that of your average battery hen.

So what would you say if I told you that you are not free?
Would you violently disagree?
Get mad at me? Would you laugh me away and say “Of course I’m free!”?
But how do you know, besides having been told you are free?
Would you just ignore me until my disturbing thoughts and words had faded from your short term memory?
No more to see?
And why is free the thing to be?
Must the caged bird wallow in its misery?
Maybe the happily unfree
Could teach a thing or two to you and me.
What use is being free if it doesn’t make you happy?
What about safety?
How about sanity?
Or even privacy?
Is saying we are not free the ultimate in heresy?
What does it really mean to be free?

That was weird.

We think that freedom means the right to choose, but who gets to decide what choices we have? I mean, sure, we have existential freedom – the freedom to choose from the menu. But who writes the menu?

And yet we think ourselves free because the menu is so big.

And who is more free… the rich or the poor? The rich can afford to do many things we would love to do but lack the means to do so. Their menu makes ours look like a pamphlet. And we like to think – in fact, are forced by society to think – that this must mean they are happier than us.

And God help them if they should suggest otherwise.

But are they truly more free? No matter how rich they are, they can’t actually make themselves any smarter. They can’t rewrite their basic personality. They can’t make people love them or respect them. They can’t force their peers to approve of them. They can’t make the love of their life love them back.

So they have plenty of options… except when it comes to the things that really matter.

Perhaps we are as free as we decide to be. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lack of options is only a problem when you need more of them. If you are happy with the menu of your life because it has everything you want on it, who’s to say there is anything wrong with that? Should you demand more options just to prove what a “normal”, freedom-loving citizen you are?

And if so, how free is that?

That’s right, I should mention conformity. No matter how free a society is on the governmental level, we will always have to deal with the pressure to conform. To blend in with the others. Even as society becomes more tolerant over time and the less supportable all overt enforcement of conformity becomes, people’s lives will always be subject to the desire to fit in with one’s peer group.

In theory, every one of us is free to dress up in rubber chickens and spackle and speak only by screaming in Morse code…. but few people do, and when they do, we judge them insane and lock them up. That is the ultimate in conformity enforcement – act too weird and we “take you away”.

Here’s the real tricky question, and I will tell you right now that I don’t have an answer : if we are not free, but we wish to be, what would more freedom even look like? How would a freer society differ from what we have now?

Even in my own libertarian paradise – where drugs, gambling, prostitution, public nudity and most forms of pornography are legal, and children are taught about their bodies and (eventually) sexuality without shame or judgment, and the people vote on bills directly instead of electing “representatives”…. even in this wonderful world, would we truly be free?

I honestly don’t know.

But solutions come from asking the right questions.

And I feel like I have asked the right ones tonight.

Of course, you are free to disagree.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.