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.