Let’s talk about timing.

It came up in therapy today. I was talking to Doctor Costin about the barriers between me and others, and how I thought that my need to really think about what I say causes me to react a second or two too late in regular conversation, and how I thought that was a big barrier I needed to overcome.

It’s obvious what causes the problem : I overthink things. Everything I say has to pass through a gauntlet of proofreaders and test audiences and the like just to make it out of my mouth. A moment or two of delay might not seem like much, but it means not only that I come across as sort of alien, but that people are likely to jump in and start talking instead of me in order to keep the conversation flowing.

You really don’t want to be the person who drags the conversation to a screeching halt every time you speak. People get tired of waiting.

The problem, at its root, is one of control. And what’s the classic problem with control? Whether you would be better off just letting things work themselves out.

Being the heavily cerebral intellectual type person that I am, my response to everything in life is to try to control it via thought. To perceive, process, and understand what is really going on in hopes of, via this knowledge, to be able to control outcomes.

In other words, to make things go my way.

And that is, of course, what all living beings must do. The problem, as usual, is a matter of degree. When you start trying to use a hammer to tighten a valve, you know you are using the wrong tool for the job. And there are many instances in life where this “thinking everything through” approach is just as foolish.

Conversation is one of them. I have come to the conclusion that competent conversation with most people requires doing something that is anathema to a thoughtful type like me : act without thinking. By the time I have thought it through, no matter how brilliant the remark is, it will be useless because nobody is listening any more. I had my moment and I missed it. Conversation is like jazz, and if the music comes to you, you are either ready to jump in or the beat goes to somebody who is.

Thus, I find myself on the precipice of terror. Acting without thought is simple something I do not do. To even contemplate it fills me with that deep unnamed dread that needs no specific outcome or particular focus in order to exist. It’s deeper than that. Deeper than our Promethean forebrains or Johnnie come lately reasoning skills.

It’s that deep deep feeling that if X occurs, Something Terrible Will Happen. Something so terrible, you dare not even predict it. It is literally unimaginable.

But sooner or later, I have to learn to live life in realtime. The two second delay method is just plain not working. So I am going to have to leap off that precipice and pray I learn to fly before I hit the ground. I have to deliberately suppress the overthinking part of my brain and go from the gut and see what happens.

This has been happening spontaneously lately, which is good. It means that I have evidence that the world will not fall down around my ears if I speak without thinking. The situation is not, as my fears would lead me to believe, that if I speak without the intense vetting and correction process, I will say horrible things that will make people hate me.

That is seriously what it feels like, folks.

And to be honest, it’s not like the current method is working super well. Most of the time I am desperately out of sync with others, and I feel like I am always struggling to keep up. A great deal of my feeling of social isolation could be simply the result of my lack of synchronicity. Crossing that gap between me and others has to be worth a little risk.

But it will also put me in the rather unique (for me) position of not actually knowing what I will say next. I can be sure it will be something I mean and that it won’t be completely stupid, but other than that… well, what I say depends on what they say, I guess.

Again : control. I have to keep telling myself that something does not have to be predictable in order to be safe. Improvisation is also acceptable. Heck, chaos is acceptable as long as it’s minor.

That’s going to be the real sticking point. When I think of a situation which I can’t anticipate, control, or contain, my mind goes blank with terror except for a single screen flashing CHAOS! MADNESS! DANGER! over and over again,.

But that’s clearly not an adaptive attitude. The universe is vast and the part of it that even the very brightest of us can predict and/or control is infinitesimal. Dealing with life clearly involves learning to tell the difference between the malign and the merely chaotic. Unpredictable = evil is no way to go through life.

And that means that regular player in my psychomachea, trust in the universe. Trust that it is not, in fact, malign and out to get me. I know this intellectually, of course. In fact, I have gone on about it at considerable length in this very space. The world can’t be out to get you because it’s not a person. And so forth.

Clearly I need to take my own advice. There is no logical reason to feel that the unpredictable (and hence chaotic) automatically must be horrible.^[1] There has to be a way to be comfortable with taking known (and unknown) risks.

But the only answer I can think of is a little thing called faith.

And I just plain don’t know if I am capable of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh right… P. S., there won’t be a blog entry tomorrow. Too much to write and too little time!

Fun time is over, and now it’s time to really fucking write.

I need to have 10-15 pages of my TV spec script done by this Friday. That’s not a huge deal… three pages a day should cover it. But I also have to write 25 pages of movie by next Monday. So that’s like, three and a half pages of THAT a day.

So um, yup. I’m a writer now.

And writing is hard, man.

I was working on my movie script this afternoon, and it takes a lot out of me. Writing screenplay is harder than any other kind of writing I have done because there are so many issue of logistics and visualization to work out. In prose, you can be minimal-ish and only put in the important stuff and have things revolve around conversations without a lot of description.

But in a screenplay, I have to visualize everything. I don’t have to describe it all, but I have to have an idea of what things look like or I will get totally lost. What’s more is that things that are very simple in my head and would seem like no big deal on the screen turn out to be amazingly tricky to actually translate into words on a page.

Things should get at least a little better when I am done writing my Act 1 introduction to the characters, plot, and crime. It will be more dialogue based, which is great in two ways : one, I love writing dialogue, it is totally my thing, and two, dialogue fills up pages way faster than scene headings and action description.

I get the feeling the main part of my movie is going to be rather chatty.

Of course, it’s early days yet. Like I said before, the first part is always the worst part because you don’t have the mental muscles to do this new thing yet. And so the first part is always like basic training. It sucks, it hurts, it’s awful, you’ll wonder if you can make it…. but if you stick with it, you will get the muscles and conditioning to make things way easier from that point on.

So hopefully, all this visual and sequence thinking will come more easily to me once I have done it a bunch. It’s not like I am totally hating the writing at the moment. It feels pretty good to see my inner vision turn into script.

But it’s just so hard.

Luckily, I have tomorrow off, and I plan to spend every spare moment writing for as long as I can stand. I want to get ahead on my work so that sudden tragedy of the grand or petit kind can’t derail me and throw me to the wolves.

In this scenario, there are wolves near the train tracks.

And honestly, the whole thing has me so worried that writing like hell will be a form of therapy. This is how neuroses make the world go round. I suppose it would be awful nice if I could simply do what I am supposed to do with an open heart and a passionate devotion to my craft, but I am just plain not that kind of person.

Not yet, anyhow.

So I have to become neurotic about things in order to stay focused and motivated. I am terrified of falling behind or missing a deadline. And it’s that fear that will hound me into writing as much as I can until the goddamned things are done.

The first drafts, anyhow.

The only time I have to spend AFK tomorrow is when I go to therapy. That will be good for me, as usual. Might as well get therapy while I can. I realized that I have been so sluggish about looking into therapy options at school because I honestly don’t want to have to start over again with someone new. The idea of having to explain myself to a new person, no matter how well-meaning and nice, makes me feel tired jsut thinking about it. Doctor Costin knows me and gets me. Plus, he has survived the crucible of exposure to an unfiltered version of myself and still has to will to live, which is rare.

I can’t say he’s ever been exposed to the actual white hot plasma radioactive core of my soul. He’s only human, after all. It might be entirely irrational, but I can’t imagine anyone surviving exposure to the blinding devouring void deep within me. If anyone ever does gain access, it will be because I have decided that I want to risk everything for the tiny chance that someone could know the real, deep me and not run away screaming into the night.

I can’t see that decision coming from a healthy place. It would be more akin to nihilistic fatalism, which is often what passes for bravery in me. I don’t so much summon up the courage to do something as push myself past the point of fear where I just don’t give a shit any more and therefore I am willing to just throw myself into the lion pit just to get it over with at last.

It is as far from classic heroic courage as one can get, and yet it does have a certain strange nobility to it.

So the next couple of weeks should be a very Zen experience, which is a 70’s way of saying it will be extremely painful in a consciousness expanding way. I am eager to meet the person I will become after the burn in period. I think he will be, overall, a happier person.

But very, very tired.

Then, at the end of the month, there’s V-Con, the GVRD’s science fiction convention. I hope to be able to get far ahead enough on my writing so that I will be able to attend and not have to worry about writing while I am there.

Oh… and I should warn you, my loyal fans, that due to the heavy workload I now face, there might be days when I can’t spare the time or energy to blog. So this blog might become slightly less than daily on days when I spend all day in class then have to come home and grind out my five or six pages.

I really hope not, but I need to be realistic.

Just remember that no matter what, I love you all.

And I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

I’m feeling rather bleh right now, and I have no idea what to write about, so I guess it’s time for a biographical update.

Let’s see. I had therapy last Friday afternoon. It felt good to be back, so to speak. I like Doctor Costin. Inasmuch as anyone does, he “gets” me. And talking with him is usually fairly productive. He adds that vital ingredient to my therapeutic process : someone to ask the questions that make me think in new ways.

That’s important because, bright as I am, left to my own devices I end up just going around in circles. Big circles, but nevertheless, progress is extremely slow compared to that which I get from having someone give me the questions I need to be asking myself.

I’m going to be seeing him again on Tuesday. As it works out, I have no classes this Tuesday or the next. So I can at least get some therapy weekly while that lasts. After that, my schedule becomes a real dog’s breakfast and I have no idea when I will have the opportunity for regular therapy again.

Plus, ya know… writing a movie and a TV spec script.

For the movie I will be writing 20 pages a week, which sounds like a lot, but it’s only a little less than three pages a day, so really, it’s not so bad. I will likely do more than that once I really get cooking, but it’s comforting to know that there’s a reasonably small daily minimum for those days when I am low on energy.

Like today, for instance.

I just have to keep reminding myself that the first draft does not have to be perfect (for there will be more) and that the important thing is to get the first draft done so I can concentrate on improving it. This, of course, runs contrary to my usual “fire and forget” methodology.

But that shit is for children. I am going to have to grow the fuck up and invest in things for the long haul if I want to make it as a TV writer. And that means staying with things even after the initial creative impulse has faded away and every instinct is telling me to put as much distance between me and the end product as possible.

As if it was not so much an act of creation as an act of excretion.

What else… last night Joe’s parents had me, Joe, Julian, and the incomparable Miss Felicity over for a barbecue. It was a pleasant evening. Tasty food, good company, and time spent out of the apartment and out of doors. It’s good for me to escape my little cloister here on a regular basis. School helps, but it’s not enough. It does me a lot of good to hang out with regular folk if I can just get over my fears.

I have to admit, though, that if school had resumed today instead of tomorrow, I would not be able to enact my “staying open and accessible” agenda. Too much bleh!

One odd thing about last night : it has been a typically super sunny and hot August day all day…. until Joe and I headed over for the BBQ. That was the exact moment the cloud cover showed up and suddenly it was much cooler and dimmer. And that cloud cover lasted almost exactly as long as our meal did!

So uh…. thanks?

Back after a brief lie-down. Feeling a little less bleh.

Can’t say I am looking forward to going back to school tomorrow. I feel like I could use another three or four days off in order to truly get the most out of this downtime. If you had asked me about it way back when my vacation time started, I would have been rock solid certain that I would be bored out of my gourd by now and itching to go back.

But the truth is, it took me a while just to relax long enough to start really enjoying the time off. I can see that now. Next time, around Halloween, I will do my best to relax early, or rather, give myself permission to lay my burdens down and not think about them for a while early.

I do feel somewhat recharged, which is good, ’cause that is kind of the point of vacations. I feel like I got to let the tensions slip away and relax in preparation for the considerable increase in burden that I know is coming my way starting tomorrow. I feel more or less prepared to throw myself into the new reality and stretch my limits to meet the new task.

The first part’s probably gonna kinda suck, though.

Adjustment periods often do. That stretch of time between initialization and adaptation can be a real bitch. It’s so bad that a lot of people balk at that point and quit, and end up not growing as people as a result. And then, they wonder why they feel so small.

I know this, because I’ve been one of those people for much of my life. But not any more. For one thing, I have school to pull me forward. I can’t balk at the challenge without failing school and that is one thing I am most definitely not prepared to do. School is my ticket to the real world, where I can do things like earn money and buy things and earn some respect from the world, and I need it badly.

But besides all that, I want to grow and stretch and become more than I am. The pain will be temporary but the improvements will be permanent, and so it’s a very good deal. Over the next two weeks I may find myself feeling tired, uncomfortable, worn out, confused, depressed, or alienated, but I am willing to do whatever it takes to keep going and triumph, whether or not it takes gritting my teeth and doubling my resolve or just sitting down and having a good cry.

I will survive. I will prevail. I WILL BE MORE.

So sayeth the fox!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, about Project Big Ego…

I realized today that part of the reason that I have resisted my potential for a big ego for so long is that I really don’t want to look down on people. The thought of it makes me feel queasy. I want to be with people, included and accepted. Looking down on them is like the opposite of that.

In some ways, I would rather be included at the bottom than lonely at the top.

Plus there’s the issue of responsibility and leadership. Were I to give in and assume the throne I have denied all my life, I would feel like it was now my responsibility to use the throne to lead people to a better life, and not only does that feel to me like a pathway to Crazytown, the idea of that much responsibility weighing me down and restricting me scares the ever loving bejesus out of me.

That’s always been the paradox with me. To me, power and responsibility are intimately linked on a 1:1 basis, and that is not negotiable. I am not capable of knowingly behaving in an irresponsible way. This is both a virtue and a burden. It could be argued that I would be better off not taking things so seriously. But I am what I am.

But responsibility scares me. I am someone who values his autonomy very highly, perhaps too highly. I can only feel safe when I am free to move as I please in all directions in order to evade or escape the bad stuff. Restrictions fill me with dread so acute it’s more or less panic. I deeply suspect that if I could work through that panic, I would come out the other side of it far healthier and stronger, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

But I am who I am right now, and right now, it’s freakout city.

Thus far, my solution has been simple, elegant, and awful : simple avoid having any power. No power, no responsibility, no panic. An ingenious form of self-defeat.

Well I am nothing if not clever.

But the thing is, I do have power. The same power I have always had : the power of my mind. Intelligence is a profound kind of power, and combined with my creativity, insight, and all the rest, I am walking around with a head full of power 24/7. Power so profound that it scares me sometimes.

Even I sometimes feel like nobody is supposed to be as smart as I am.

So the real situation is not that I am safely powerless, it’s that I pretend to be powerless while ignoring, discounting, and otherwise suppressing the power I do have.

That’s why I keep coming back to the question of whether or not someone has a moral obligation to use their gifts to benefit society. I have always held that if you have the power to help, you must help. It’s a positive duty, something you must do, as opposed to a negative duty, something you must NOT do.

By that logic, I should be out there using my gifts to help in any way I can. For instance, I could be a fairly potent spokesperson for a noble and just cause. Or I could work behind the scenes writing speeches and organizing advocacy. I could write about my own brand of pragmatic liberalism with hopes of starting a movement. And so forth and so on.

But I want a life as well. And a fun career. I want to write for television, and I will just have to save the world that way, so to speak. Whatever I write, I will find ways to advance my agenda, often in ways that seem like nothing but harmless fun and silliness. I’m sneaky like that.

As always, there is also the lurking issue of option paralysis to contend with. There are so many things I could do with all this potential. How do I know which one is right? I can’t help but feel that if I was a less cerebral person and more in touch with my emotions and instincts, I would be better equipped to make that kind of decision. I would have gut instincts I trusted and a sense that even if I make the wrong choice, I will be okay.

Instead, I am like the Wimpy Kirk from the Two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek series. Sensitive…. but indecisive.

And I definitely feel that this indecision is an excuse that I hide behind. An excuse to avoid risk and stay in the safe world of mere potential instead of having to become a real person.

That’s why I like that I have now made a choice. I am going to write for TV. All I have to do is keep plugging away at school and I will get there. I chose my bus and got on it, so I am now on my way to somewhere instead of remaining an inert lump of nothingness that played video games and hung out online.

For twenty fucking years. Damn.

Which brings us all the way back to… the topic! Quelle shoq!

If I were to really take full responsibility for my power and sit my ass down on that throne, the only way I can see of relating to the world is to turn those around me into adherents to the cult of me. Not that I dream of power, but the problem is that if I felt this responsibility for the welfare of others, it would inevitably lead to my feeling the need to lead them.

And I don’t know any other way to lead than to get people believing in me and my own, for lack of a better word, wisdom. There are formal ways of getting power, like rising up in an organization, but that is not the sort of power I am looking for.

It would have to be a cult of personality.

And I hate those.

So what’s a fella suppose to do?

Stay a humble human just trying to get by in this big ol room, I guess.

But I could be so much more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m back on contemplating the idea of just letting myself become all smug and cocky again.

I need some way of sealing the big hole in my self and my self-esteem. I have enough positive attributes to make for one heck of an amazing fellow if I let it happen. I have resisted this possibility for my whole love out of some admonition not to get a “swelled head” when I was a child. But more important, out of a desire not to become the sort of arrogant flippant smug asshole that seem to me to be attached to this potential version of myself.

I value being a nice person. It’s always been one of my best attributes as far as I am concerned. And it gives me great pleasure in the doing of it, too. It makes me feel very good to actively reduce the amount of hurt and pain in the world.

On the other hand…. I would kind of like to have a life, too. And it can be argued that with my nice-guy persona comes a lot of my passivity and timidity. Either way, it’s a bad deal.

And I have to ask myself a very harsh question : am I willing to live the rest of my life as a useless lump and a burden on others just to save the world for the awfulness in me? Is that a deal I am prepared to make with the world? For all I know, opening the floodgates would actually make me a much better person because I would finally be engaged in living instead of retreating into my mental isolation in order to cope. I might discover a whole new equilibrium, far superior to my current deathly doldrums.

I might finally get the sort of positive social input that I need to repair my ancient social damage and be whole again.

Surely that’s worth a certain amount of risk.

As to becoming a smug and callous asshole, I can handle that on a case by case basis. I know that this transformation may end up disrupting existing relationships. I don’t want that to happen, but I am no longer willing to stay in my tiny little box in order to prevent. I will work hard to minimize the damage, but this is something I need to do.

It definitely feels like this is the Next Thing. And the secret of life is to do the Next Thing, every time. That’s how you preserve momentum.

And that’s far more important than doing the best thing. Maybe you’ll make a huge mistake. Maybe it will be the best thing you ever did. Either way, you will keep going, and with your momentum preserved, it will be far easier to fix whatever you have done wrong.

Almost anything beats floundering in endless indecision because of your inability to connect with the powerful vital force which lies within all of us. Call it the id, call it the life force, call it whatever you want, but it’s as real and valid as any act of mentation and without it, we are toys without batteries.

Had therapy today, for the first time in two months. It felt good. One of the things that this past week and change of contemplation has revealed unto me is that I have been terribly isolated for a while. For this month, certainly. At some point, I lost that vital momentum and reverted to being very closed off to the world, and I feel like that cost me some of my current social progress. In between the distorting effect that social isolation has on what I say and do and the chilliness and fear I no doubt project, I was not getting on with my fellow students, and that is not good.

I am hoping that our experiences in the trenches of hardcore writing this term will forge tighter bonds. I already feel like we are slowly gelling as a group. We’re certainly pretty darn relaxed around one another. These are the people who are meant to be lifelong friends and contacts in “the biz”, so hopefully they will not hold my recent withdrawal and crankiness against me.

And after all, there’s four more terms to go, so there is plenty of time to repair whatever damage I might have done!

Tomorrow, I will throw myself into my writing. I am going to try to get to ten pages done on my movie and five pages done on my Bob’s Burgers episode before the day is done. I assume I will have to work on both of them at the same time, seeing as there will be pages due in both classes, so it’s not like I have the luxury to do one then the other.

And frankly, I am enjoying writing the Bob’s Burgers episode more. So I will use it as a kind of treat for myself. This is the first time in my life I have written sitcom dialogue and it’s loads of fun. I honestly feel like part of me has been doing it ever since I was a sitcom-loving kid trying, subconsciously, to live in a sitcom version of the world.

Writing the movie is way harder. So much more to think about. It will be easier once I am through the visual stuff at the beginning. It was really, really hard for me to write the opening montage. I could see it in my head, but writing it all down was hard in a way that is hard to quantify because the difficulty came not from the actual act but how hard it was to get myself thinking that way.

Guides to the previous sentence are available for purchase in the lobby.

I am sure I will learn to think visually (or at least, visually enough) in time. It’s just new territory for me. Dialogue is my natural environment. I am a conversationally biased critter.

I just realized, though…. I can try writing sight gags now! Wow!

I mean, not like Angie Tribeca sight gags… that would not be the style of Bob’s Burgers at all… but still.

I have so much fun ahead of me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Dunno why I am so damned sleepy today.

I guess it’s just one of my sleepy days. And I wish I had the luxury to indulge it. But I have made plans to go see Pete’s Dragon with a friend (and reader of this blog), and that’s in two or three hours, so even when I am done blogging here I will not have all that much time for napping.

Ain’t that always the way?

Being quite sleepy, my powers of concentration are at ebb tide. I keep having to drag my mind back to the blogging. It’s so easy to get distracted.

Had a pleasant afternoon yesterday. It was Cheque Day, so I took the bus to my bank, cashed La Cheque, then treated myself to lunch at the nearby Boston Pizza. Normally, it would be the White Spot a little further away, but I felt like doing something different and I haven’t been to a Boston Pizza in ages.

I ordered something called a Bacon and Pepperoni Pizzaburger, expecting it to be a basic burger with pizza toppings. Instead, what I got was a burger patty wrapped in a pizza, basically. Like a burger shaped calzone. The cheese, pepperoni, and bacon were in the space between the burger and the pizza crust shell.

It was… interesting. It was significantly too hot to eat like a burger when it came to me, so I cut it in half with my table knife to encourage cooling. After a couple of minutes, it was merely hot, not scald your palate hot.

After that, I want to PriceSmart (formerly a Sav-On Foods, but they changed the name to fuck with the union) to pick up a few things, then walked home.

My feet did not hurt too much, which gives me hope that this time off has undone some of the damage done to my feet by all that walking to school from the Skytrain and back. It’s a sad thing to realize that a small amount of perfectly normal walking can really mess up your feet. I was supposed to make a doctor’s appointment with my GP to see about getting something seriously orthopedic for my poor flat feet this week, but oops, nope, didn’t happen.

I will have to work it into my school schedule somehow.

I’ve looked over the schedule for next term, and it looks like I will be taking six classes like last term. Fair enough. I am kind of curious as to what it is going to be like to workshop 20 pages of movie script a week from multiple students. The table reads will certainly be longer. Ditto for the feedback sheets. Plus there’s the TV spec script.

So yeah. Shit’s getting real, y’all.

Which is fine by me. I like writing. It’s a lot more work than my usual mode, but that’s a good thing. It drains me of those excess energies that fuel so much of the bad shit that goes on my head. Plus it’s good for me to push myself past my usual rather pathetically tiny limits. The true road to freedom from fear and ennui is to expanding your comfort zone and building confidence in your ability to handle things. It’s the opposite of the constant surrender of depression and despair.

It’s like the depressive is stuck in the “give up and run away to hide” mode of animal conflict. Two animals square off : one will win, and the other will surrender, at which point the winner’s attack ceases and the loser is permitted to run away to lick their wounds.

Now try to apply that to humans versus all sorts of conflicts and challenges of life, and you begin to see the futility of it all. Life, not being a person or even an animal, does not and cannot accept your surrender. Whatever you consider to be its attacks on you, it will not stop when you give up. It will not let you go. It’s like asking a tsunami to show mercy.

Surrender can be quite addictive, though. Like I have said before, there is a pleasure in giving in to your fears and quitting trying. Suddenly, the tension is gone, and that relief can be quite narcotic. But it’s like gnawing a limb off to get out of a trap. Sure, it works, but it costs you a lot and you would want to make absolutely sure there was no other option.

The adaptive solution is to learn to get a grip on yourself in these scary and tense situations so you can figure out a smarter solution to your problem. If you can pull that off, not only will you escape the situation with all your limbs intact (so to speak), you will have the memory of triumph to bolster your confidence in future conflicts.

I have been making a conscious effort lately to identify the “good” choice and the “bad” choice in various situations, and then make the “good” one. By good, I mean healthy and adaptive. Doing something when I don’t feel like it but I know it will be the healthier choice for me is the “good” direction. Giving in and giving up and saying “fuck it” is the “bad” direction.

And even though the “bad” direction is always easier, every time I make the “good” choice, I get a little stronger, and I escape my depression’s gravity field a little more.

after I am done bloggin’, I am going to take a short nap. William gets off work at 2 pm and will be heading here immediately. That gives me until 2 pm for a little nap. Hopefully, by dragging myself through blogging, I have woken myself up enough so that a brief nap is all I need in order to feel freshened up.

I have a liter of diet cola in me, but as usual, caffeine’s effects on me are somewhat unpredictable. I think people learn to use what caffeine gives by using it in conjunction with their jobs enough so that a firm association is made.

I have yet to have such an opportunity.

Hope I will in the future!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the thing.

On the one hand, I’m highly intelligent, articulate, deep, thoughtful, and in the right milieu, I can even be pretty impressive.

On the other hand, it seems to be a fundamental part of my nature and my life that I am going to do dumb shit over and over again.

Why? I think the core cause is my dreamy, introverted nature. I am always going to prioritize my inner world over outer details, and that means I will always forget things or not think them through properly or otherwise become terribly confused because either my demanding inner processes will overwrite whatever circuitry was holding the important information or I never really had enough room for it all in the tiny space left over from the presence all that heavy machinery inside my head to begin with.

It’s an amazing thing to realize that all the heavy duty thoughts in your head could be making you, in some ways, stupid.

And I don’t feel like there’s much I can do about that. Not directly. If ever I stop making these dumb mistakes that make he look like a bubbleheaded idiot, it will be because the process of recovery has freed up enough of my mental space to allow me to keep things in my head more easily.

Either that, or I have to somehow construct the equivalent of protected memory in my mind. Memory that can only be used by the “keeping track of things” program, period.

Ick. Even the idea of it sounds gross to me. My dreams must always come first. Imagination over all. Walling off some of my memory would limit the size of my ideas, and that’s something I simply cannot abide. I dream big, as big as I can. It’s the wellspring of both my creativity and my insight.

So that’s out of the question.

Looks like I am just going to have to make peace with the fact that I am going to keep doing goofy shit.

Like today. Today, I somehow got the idea in my head that I had to have pages done on my TV spec script by Friday. So I posted a question to my class’ Facebook page asking how many pages were due, thus unnecessarily (as it turns out) freaking out a few people.

Because we do not have pages due this Friday. What some people (not me) have due is the final version of their detailed outline. All I have due is my comment sheets on those once they are posted. That’s a matter of an hour’s work or so. No sweat.

So not only did I manufacture a reason to panic for myself, I brought other people into it too.

And I am doing shit like that all the time. I guess I should be glad that I am an affable, lovable person who would never dream of pretending like my mistake was someone else’s fault or get super defensive about it. When I mess up, I admit it right away and apologize. And I imagine it’s hard to stay mad at someone like that.

So I got that going for me.

And I feel like I am slowly pulling myself together over time, for which school is a wonderful stimulus. I already feel like this little vacation has given me enough time to work through some very heavy duty stuff, the result of which will be a better me when I go back to school.

I will once more push myself into not being so withdrawn and insular. I have nothing to be ashamed of! And yeah, I know, I am not really on most people’s frequency. But I am determined to learn to dial them the fuck in. So I can’t express my innermost depths without talking like an alien as far as most people are concerned.

That doesn’t mean I can’t relax and have fun with people. I just need to stop being so childishly set in my ways and be flexible enough to learn the local lingo. It’s no compromise, it’s me pusuing something I want, mainly a more engaged life where I am not so goddamned alone.

Aaaand it would probably help if I can dial back the desperation a fair bit. Desperation is one of the worst possible things to reek of. If I can find my way to at least pretending to be more confident and independent than I really am, it would probably do wonders for getting myself the sort of social approval that would help to make it real.

Self-enhancing cycles don’t have to negative.

I still won’t know how to make friends, sadly. But maybe that’s not an active skill people know. Maybe it has a lot more to do with what you let in. I am positive there are people in my life who tried to befriend me but I was just too cold and scared inside to take them up on it, or even perceive it consciously.

And if I am being totally honest, I know I am still very scared of forming new friendships, with all those unforeseeable consequences and untamed variables and the real and potent threat of making me leave the safe and comfortable life I currently lead and end up in the land of social exposure and terror.

That is literally how I think. Or rather, how the unhealthy part of my mind thinks. I have been clinging to my sad little life like a barnacle for a very long time and it’s very hard to convince myself that it is okay to let go. That’s how anxiety robs you of all courage.

I wish I was the sort of person who could embark upon a life of risk and adventure (the real kind, not that fantasy shit) but I just don’t have that kind of confidence yet. It will take something exterior to me (like a job offer) to get me to do that.

Until then, I will just toddle along in my usual way, getting a little better every day.

It might be slow, but it beats the hell out of going nowhere.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why do I talk like I do?

What is it in me that drives it?

Why can’t I talk like a normal person?

These are the questions that are on my mind today. I have finally reached the point of maturity and/or recovery where I can really ask myself what the deal is with all of that. Before now, I think I lacked the necessary distance from my self and questions of ego and identity and such to do it.

But now, I think it is time.

Why do I talk like I do, and how much does that contribute to my inability to connect with people?

Let’s tackle the first question. The obvious answer to the question of why I talk like I do is that I am constantly trying to show how smart I am. And I am sure there’s some of that in there. Certainly, I have been accused of that many times in my life. And I can see why someone would think that. It’s an explanation that makes sense to regular folks. After all, that’s what it would mean if they are doing it.

And I cannot deny that I want people to think I am brilliant.

But I think that’s only a small part of it. I think mostly it has to do with my desperate desire to express myself through words.

Looking back over my life, I can see that I have been trying to express my unique thoughts and unusual emotions through words since I was very young. I was verbally focused from a very early age. And so I have been trying to figure out how to explain myself to people for as long as I can remember. And I think that, on a deep subconscious level, I have blamed myself for some of the bad things that have happened in my life for not being able to articulate it properly to the people I wanted to tell.

I can see how that happened. If the problem was my not being able to spit it out properly, that means that I can fix it if I become sufficiently articulate. It remains within my power to solve the problem. All I have to do is get better at words.

This is typical of the sort of setup one gets when one experiences trauma at an early age. The younger the person, the less sophisticated (and forgiving) their coping mechanisms will be. And it’s when we are young that our most important programming, the really deep stuff, is created.

And that’s honestly the kind of job that shouldn’t be left to children.

As a result of this, I think I have been trying to put as much as I could of myself into words – my thoughts, emotions, ideas, everything – for my whole life. It’s like I am trying to escape my own inner prison through a door made of words. And every advance in my articulacy brings me a little closer to being able to do it.

And you have to admit, that setup does sound like it would lead someone to be a heck of a writer.

And I am!

So maybe the problem is that I am asking too much of my words when I talk. This burning desire to express myself makes me want to impart as much meaning as I can into every word, and that leads to me talking like a man from space from the point of view of the average person on the street. It’s not that I am inarticulate, obviously. It’s that I am trying too hard and I don’t know how to talk in a relaxed and relatable way. A way that does not necessarily express that much or use all my mental and verbal strength… but that DOES make sense to other people.

I suppose I passively blamed others for this until now. There was nothing wrong with how I talked, it was their fault for not being able to understand me. That’s clearly ridiculous, of course. They are the normal ones, inasmuch as that word means anything. I am the nonstandard model.

Ergo, I am the one with the problem. A blind man doesn’t blame the world for being based on vision. Not if he is wise.

Besides, blame or no blame, I can’t change the world and so it is I who must adjust. I will never stop trying to articulate myself and make myself understood. But if I want to connect with the real world and all its peoples, I will have to learn to talk like they do.

Learn the local lingo, so to speak.

And being stubborn about it does no good. Refusing to adapt to the circumstances because it would be a violation of my precious self would be childish. As would retreating into the usual isolation and self-satisfied misanthropy of the intellectual class.

That might work for others but it could never work for me. I want to connect with people. I want to be part of the bright and warm world outside my mind. I can’t wall myself off from humanity like that. If I did, I would go completely insane.

It’s my desire to communicate with others and really connect that keeps me in the real world in the first place.

Plus, on a practical level, I want to go out there and get work and get things done, so…. that’s kind of going to involve getting along with people. Besides, I hate the idea of being an Internet hermit. I had twenty years of that bullshit. I am done.

The question is, then : can I learn to talk like a normal person? I have the verbal skills, naturally, but do I have the social inputs? Will I be able to square it with that inner child voice that refuses to meet people halfway? Can I, in this sense, get the fuck over myself?

Only time will tell, but I am sure of one thing :

I am going to try.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s surprisingly tricky.

This is mostly due to my own particular hedge maze of psychological issues. On the one hand, I know that the most important thing for me to do right now, as well as the only thing I am “supposed” to be doing, is resting, relaxing, and recharging my batteries in anticipation of next term, when shit gets serious.

And I am doing that, more or less. I am trying to keep all thoughts about the future and what I am “supposed” to be doing right now out of my mind. I know that this is necessary because if I let a lot of pressure attach to things like getting a head start on writing my movie and my TV spec script and such, it will not lead to results.

It will, in face, lead to becoming avoidant about the whole thing, and that is definitely deeply counterproductive. I am, obviously, going to have to write the damn things sooner or later, and if I put too much pressure on myself about it and become avoidant, I will have a big bad psychological barrier to overcome just to get done what I need to get done.

And I don’t need THAT.

On the other hand, we have the problem of my coping with the idleness. I found myself slipping into depression this afternoon. My motivation was gone, I didn’t even want to get out of bed, I just wanted to escape into sleep for as long as I possibly could so that I wouldn’t have to deal with life and all those empty, meaningless hours of futility.

It was bad enough that I had to basically force myself to get up and play video games for a while. Think about that. I had to force myself to do a leisure activity I normally enjoy. But no, I approached it like it was painful physical therapy.

After playing video games for an hours or so, I gave into the temptation to go back to bed. But before I drifted back into my usual “zeroing out” near-sleep, I finally remembered what it I could do to get myself out of this situation : get dressed! I’d been hanging around naked up until that point, and that’s a big no-no for my mental health. When I do it, I end up in this twilight zone between waking and sleeping where I can’t really function because I’m not truly awake, and that is highly deleterious to my mood.

Maintaining a positive mood requires a certain amount of cognitive power, at least for me, at least for now. There are a lot of real-time corrections to negative thinking that needs to be done, and I can’t do that if I am not running on all cylinders.

So I promised myself I would get dressed when I got up again, and I did. And I feel way better now.

I’m still feeling restless though. Video games and the Internet can only keep me occupied for so long. Masturbation helps a little, but not much. I need more things to do. Humanity is not meant to be idle. We need purposeful action in order to be whole.

That means that I don’t have a choice as to whether I crawl through the minefield of anxiety, aversion, and depression in order to find something purposeful to do. Unless I want to be miserable for the next week, I will need want to find some kind of productive activity.

Right now, starting in on writing my movie seems very intimidating. I am intimidated by the challenge of writing an entire movie period. It just seems like so much substance to have to conjure. I am the sort of artist who puts a lot of themselves into their work, and that’s a heck of a lot of myself to invest in one thing.

So I think I will approach it like I did my novels. X amount a day, every day, and that’s it. Luckily, I won’t have to enter it with the idea that “I only have to know what happens next”, because I have all the major beats worked out, thanks to school.

Mostly, it will be writing the in-between stuff that happens between beats. And the jokes, of course. I have gone back and forth on whether my movie will be a comedy or not, but honestly, at this point, I can’t imagine writing anything else. I have proved to myself that one thing I can definitely do is write funny and charming dialogue, so it would be silly not to use that in my movie. My plan is to make my protagonist very likable. I want people to love Babs as much as I do. And of course, I love making people laugh.

So a comedy it shall be!

But it’s me, so it will be a comedy with pathos as well. Seeing as this is more or less just meant to show potential employers what I can do, I should try to display all my talents, and one thing I am good at is evoking emotion. So, expect a bit of a roller coaster ride.

My Bob’s Burgers episode won’t be nearly as strenuous. After all, I only have 22 minutes of time to fill, which should work out to something like thirty pages. I am looking forward to that. It’s a length I am way more comfortable with, and because all the characters and most of the locations are already established, I won’t have to do a huge amount of physical description.

I just have to do what I do best : comedy and emotion!

The most important thing, I think, is to keep things light and fun. That way I can approach the whole thing as a fun and exciting thing to do, instead of looking at it as this intimidating burden hanging over my head like the Sword of Democles.

So who knows. Maybe I will start one or the other soon. Maybe I won’t.

But one thing is for sure :

I ain’t gonna spend the whole time playing fucking video games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last time, I talked about hard lessons in taking responsibility for my unique gifts in verbal intelligence.

Today, we talk about my ability to read minds.

Not via telepathy, of course. I don’t knows exactly what it call it, but it’s not like I heard people’s thoughts. Thank goodness. But I seem to have a very strong ability to figure out what makes people tick. It’s a combination of empathy, observations, insights, understanding, sympathy, and a certain fluidity of identity that makes it easy to put myself in other people’s shoes.

I am not sure when it began. Some time in elementary school, certainly. I remember hiding from my bullies and deciding that I wanted to figure out why they treated me like they did. It was, shall we say, a highly pertinent mystery.

And I remember that the seed around which the whole thing crystallized : the idea that everything everybody does makes sense to them.

And so I had to learn a few things about the world and how I relate to it, starting with the most important lesson :

1. Not everyone sees things like I do.

This was the hardest one because by understanding of others operates on a perceptual level so it is, metaphorically speaking, like I see into their minds. Things that are obvious to me are not necessarily obvious to others. I still have problems with this sometimes because it’s hard for me to figure out what other people see when they think of others. In that limited capacity, it really is like a sixth sense. Like being the one eyed man in the land of the blind.

Ironic given how weak my actual sight is.

But it’s very, very important that I try to figure out how others see things, because…

2. People really, really, really don’t like people who see right through them

When I was younger, I would talk about what I saw in other people’s heads to them as if what was obvious to me must be even more obvious to them. After all, they were seeing it from the inside. But that’s not at all the case. I had to face the fact that I often knew people better than they knew themselves. This would have made me a boffo therapist, but as a person, it’s creepy as hell and people quite rightfully will get mad at you for poking around in their head like that.

And I get that. I understand it even though I don’t share it myself. Honestly, if people took the time to figure me out like that, I’d be delighted. I have never been a secretive person. Partially that is because of my basic temperament. I like things to be honest, direct, and free of unnecessary complications. Secrets and lies are the opposite of that. I am heavily biased towards the truth.

But it’s also because I have never had to be secretive. When nobody is paying any attention to you, secrets become laughably redundant. Some people are born secretive, but a lot of other people became that way because they grew up in an environment where information control was a survival skill.

People need their secrets and illusions. They need them in order avoid feeling exposed to the world. Because….

3. When you see through people, you strip them naked socially

Again, this is hard for me to empathize with because I am not that way. I am, more or less, an open book. Perhaps that’s why people describe me as genuine, I dunno. But most people have a cultivated public persona through which they conceal their flaws and by which they control how they are perceived.

So when I blithely and bluntly talk about their deepest darkest secrets like it’s no big thang, it’s as if I had literal X-ray vision and casually say “By the way, that’s a very skillful circumcision.”

Uh no. That is Bad.

So in a sense, I have had to try to deduce the truth about things which are invisible to me. Luckily, once my siblings corrected me on the issue enough times for it to sink in, I at least learned to get the basics down. I knew I could not help seeing what I do. It’s how I perceive the world.

But I sure as hell could stop talking about it.

That left me with another problem, though….

4. The temptation to use what I see for my own personal gain is constant

I have enormous respect for people’s autonomy and the right to be alone in their own heads, if you see what I mean. It would be morally offensive to me in the extreme if I was take advantage of the unique access I have to people’s hearts minds and souls to twist or manipulate them into going against their own self-interest to the benefit of mine.

But the temptation is always there. Push someone’s button here, trigger a neuroses there… it would be so easy.

So I tend to obsess about the difference between manipulation and influence. We all try to influence one another and we all consider that fairly legit. But manipulation is bad. It’s not the sort of thing nice people do. It is considered underhanded and unfair and preys upon people’s weaknesses and flaws for personal gain.

But to someone like be, they can seem like practically the same thing.

So I could never define the difference. I know I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else. That would make me a colossal prick. Not for me the “I’m just doing what everyone else is doing, I’m just better at it than they are” dodge. I have never been able to stomach that kind of self-serving bullshit. If you don’t want someone using their natural advantages over you, don’t use yours on them.

It’s as simple as that.

Except that it’s not simple at all. I am going to enter the world of entertainment, where a case can be made that everyone really is out for themselves and using whatever advantages they have to get ahead.

So the rules, I think, are going to change. I will have to expand my definitions of acceptable use of mental force. I will still be able to hold to a strict sense of what is right and wrong, but it will have to become a tad more compact and well defined.

I’m not selling out, I’m buying in!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.