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Been pondering the meaning and implications of being He Who Walks Through Walls.

Not physically, of course. Socially. Psychologically. Philosophically. What price have I paid for my much vaunted ability to see through to the truth all the time? What was it that made me able to inherently understand how the walls of social reality were nothing but puffs of smoke, as easily bypassed as a line painted on the sidewalk? Where has my extreme independence of mind really gotten me? When you can casually disregard the rules others live by, the very pillars of their consciousness of the world, what do those people think of you? Do they hate you? Admire you? Disregard you entirely because you’re mentally indigestible to them?

Mostly that last one, in my case, I think.

I am not sure if I was born with this fanatical need to be independent of mind or whether it’s a result of traumatic damage to my social antenna. Certainly I was very bright from the beginning, and I have theorized in the past that this might lead to a developmental bias towards intellectual growth over a more concrete social understanding of the world.

But perhaps that also leads to taking things far too literally. I have also talked here about how us nerdy intellectual types completely misinterpret social interactions because they take them far too literally and end up missing the social context entirely.

You know, one kid walks up to another, insults him,  and slugs him on the shoulder. Where he comes from, that’s a standard play entreaty. He expects to get the same in return, followed by maybe some play-fighting.

But the kid is from an entirely different social context where there is no such thing as playful violence, so as far as he knows, he was just randomly assaulted by a stranger. He reacts accordingly, crying out in pain and looking at the first kid like he’s a monster.

The first kid doesn’t know how to interpret that, so he reacts to it as a rejection. So he does what his social context tells him to do, which is to call the other person a wimp for reacting to a simple greeting-punch like it’s a brutal karate chop to the nads.  In his social context, that’s meant to solicit the proper play-fighting response.

But devoid of social context, this seems to the punched kid like a further assault, and one that is brutally (and brutishly) unfair.

And so forth and so on. I’ve been through this before.

The punch to the shoulder is, I admit, an extreme example, but I think the basic misunderstanding between the two sides of the intellectual coin runs through all the problems that we nerdy types run into. By being ignorant of most of the social reality that defines the lives of people of average intelligence, the nerds constantly misunderstand what is really going on around them and end up viewing the world as more arbitrary and cruel than it really is.

Whoops, I started off trying to talk about myself and then wandered off into the academic again. How intellectual of me!

Back to that ferocious independence of mind. It really feels inborn to me. Like it’s the other side of the coin from my passivity. I am passive and tend to go with the flow, which is why despite my intellect I was mostly a well-behaved kid. But I am also very strongly opinionated and quite capable (and a bit too willing) to defend my opinions. And I simply cannot abide anyone trying to control me via force. I won’t accept it.

So it’s more like I am passive unless a certain line is crossed. I couldn’t exactly define that line because it’s very much an internal thing. I know the line has been crossed when the alarm goes off, basically. And then the other side of my personality comes out.

And I am pretty sure that is part of my basic temperament. I find it hard to imagine a version of myself that follows the rules because they’re the rules. Maybe if the rules had actually protected me, I would sing a different tune.

But they didn’t, and so to me, rules are agreements and nothing more. To me, they are no more real than the lines on a map. I follow the rules, for the most part, because most of them make sense to me and seem necessary for social cohesion.

However, I also feel no moral compulsion to follow ones I think are pointless, stupid, or downright destructive. I might follow them for practical reasons, but never moral.

Maybe that interfered with my social learning, though. Perhaps people learn social skills and social consciousness by fitting themselves into the rules and by sharing that experience with others doing the same.

Me, I remained the same no matter what. I did not allow myself to be socially constrained or defined. And therein, I think, lay the seeds of my downfall.

Even then, though, I might have fared better had I been a proud and haughty person. But I am sensitive and eager to please. I really want people to like me. I want to get that feeling of approval and acceptance.

I’m just tragically lacking in the basic cognitive skills that would let me get it. No wonder I am drawn to show business!

And the combination of being eager to please and socially clueless basically makes a person pathetic, and that’s the worst thing you can be. You can be a raging asshole and still get some respect. But pathetic people disqualify themselves from respect and automatically end up at the bottom of the heap.

Once again, I ponder whether I would have been better off just listening to the side of me that wanted to go the intellectual elitist route.

But I couldn’t do it then. And I couldn’t do it now.

So maybe I am the person I am meant to be.

Then what am I so depressed about?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I finally have the time to do a blog entry! w00t!

It’s been a tense week. Having a weekend during which I did no homework was surprisingly debilitating to my school life. If I was better at this whole adulting thing, I suppose I would have made sure to get far enough ahead in my schoolwork before V-con so that the time off would have been no big deal.

But that is levels and levels beyond my meager coping skills, and so instead, I had a stressful week where every night, I only had time to get the next day’s homework done. I hadn’t even played my current video game until after I finished today’s work.

And what is really complicating matters is that I keep getting sick, and I am starting to get pretty worried about that.

I missed a class today because I was quite ill. I woke up in the morning and felt absolutely wretched. I felt weak and drained and I was quite incoherent to boot. Could not concentrate. And I had this feeling like I had been pressed between two plates of glass like a specimen uynder a microscope.

I went through the motions of getting ready but when it came time to actually leave, I knew there was absolutely no way I could do it.  The thought of opening the door to leave seemed crazy, let alone actually leaving and having to cope with the world.

And the really fucked up thing is that here I am, twelve hours later, and I still have not fully recovered. This leads me to believe that I genuinely have some kind of nasty bug and it’s not just that I woke up with a low blood O2 amount due to sleep apnea.

Gee, if there was only some sort of machine that could help me with that.

Last Monday I was sick with con crud, too. So I only made it to school three out of the five days. As an academic worry, that’s troubling. But as a health worry, that’s very disturbing.

I went a long long time without missing a day of school, and yet lately, I have missed one or more days of the last three weeks or so. I think something must be messing with my immune system. Either that, or there is something wrong on a deeper level.

I’d rather it was an immune thing. That, I know how to fix.

Because the number one compromiser of my immune system is high blood sugar. And I have been very, very naughty lately. So I can see myself adding some extra insulin to my routine and seeing if that makes me feel better.

I also feel like my pores might be clogged, so a long hot shower or bath would probably do me a lot of good. Bad stuff happens when our bodies can’t cool itself properly. We mammals produce a lot of heat. Every cell in our bodies produces heat as a byproduct of metabolism. That’s how it is we can be warm-blooded creatures who are always at the right temperature for maximum metabolic efficiency.

That is, if everything is working right.

Of course, the physical distress brings with it a fair bit of emotional depression. I don’t feel very good about life right now and part of me wants to just curl up in bed with a book and tune out reality entirely by sleeping as much as I possibly can.

What keeps me from doing so is the swift and certain knowledge that such a course of action would only lead to me feeling a lot worse.

And that’s a kind of maturity, I suppose.

Still, I am going to have to keep myself busy, because when I feel like this, the worst time is always the time when my energy returns but it’s blocked by the illness and I end up in a hellish condition where those two forces go to war and I feel trapped and crazed and ready to snap in a million directions at once.

So this weekend will be a time for getting better and staying busy. Right now, my homework status is “current”, inasmuch as I have done all my currently pressing work. That makes it a great time for me to throw myself into getting ahead on my work so I can reduce my stress levels considerably.

Less stress also leads to better health.

It’s day like these which make me wish I could just press a button and my body would purge itself of all the toxins plaguing it. Flush itself out. It would be intense, possibly even hellish, but at least I would feel a lot better afterward.

Sounds like the sort of thing one does in the shower for ease of cleanup.

That’s why I have never poo-poo’d various “detox” products. A scientific case can be made for flushing out your system now and then in order to rid it of the stuff that the body doesn’t know how to handle and thus it just accumulates in our system.

But more than that,  I can understand the impulse. I often feel quite toxic. Like I am so polluted that I have become poisonous to myself and others, and only some kind of deep purification can possibly save the world from me no matter how good my intentions might be or how distressing I am finding it to hurt others.

How much of that is psychological and how much of it is  physiological I could not say.  The two interact on too intimate a level for me to be able to examine. The possibility of psychosomatic illness has haunted me ever since I was a little kid who was so anxious about having to go to school that he would try to make himself genuinely sick so that he would not have to go.

That could be construed as a red flag of sorts. But nobody was looking. Nobody was trying to put the pieces together. Nobody thought I was worth figuring out.

As you can see, I am not merely toxic.

I’m also bitter.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am, back in the world of reality, where I am depressingly NOT constantly surrounded by my fellow nerds, and where there is NOT a plethora of fascinating and fun panels stretching before me, and where there is a distinct LACK of living in a hotel room where I could, if I wanted to, get fresh bedding whenever the fuck I wanted it.

But I had a ton o’ fun at the convention.

I noted which panels I went to, and that should be enough for me to to reconstruct the weekend and thus write a con report for publication in BCSFAzine, or really in any periodical that asks.

I’m that desperate for validation.

I don’t quite feel up to writing said con report right now. I have been home all day (more on that in a bit) and I have no Diet Coke to drink to give me artificial motivation/anxiety (there’s sort of the same thing with me), so I am not exactly at my most mentally active right now. The idea of pulling all my thoughts and memories together into a coherent and linear narrative seemed downright insane right now.

Besides, I have another thing to get done : I need to write my 20 desk jokes. They’re an assignment from Sketch class, and the idea was that I was supposed to be doing 5 a week for the last four weeks, but that… didn’t end up happening.

So instead, I am going to write them all today and polish them up tomorrow afternoon, when I will be home from school and able to devote some time to turning my raw jokes into finely machined comedic masterpieces.

At least, that’s the idea.

So far, I have written 10. So I am halfway done. I have been using Facebook and Fark as sources for news stories to riff upon. So far, only 2 of my 10 jokes are Donald Trump jokes, because I figure everyone will be making Trump jokes and I will be better off riffing off less mainstream news, like scientific discoveries or funny news stories about someone doing something dumb.

Like, there was this one story I can’t use because it would be fat-shaming, but this pretty obese lady in the UK climbed up into her shopping trolley (cart) and sat down in/on the child seat, then got her ass stuck there and they had to call the police, who called the firefighters, who got her out of there.

Nowhere in the story was there the slightest hint of an answer as to WHY she did it. Was it a bet? Did she dream of being able to shop without having to use her legs? Was she trying to reach something on a high shelf and slipped? Did she have an emotional crisis that caused her to regress in age?

We may never know, because nobody knew the woman’s name, which is probably just as well in the long run.

Still, I am both fat and kind of insane,  so I certainly can’t say that I can’t imagine ever being in that poor woman’s situation. I have done some pretty crazy things when my depression was biting very hard and I entered a kind of slap-happy kind of dazed state as my body fought the depression by flooding my mind with endorphins.

Things like shoplifting outrageously, urinating places where I knew people in the surrounding office buildings could see me, laughing like a maniac for no reason, and deciding to climb over a fence and damn near kill myself because it was a more direct route to my destination.

Yes, depression can even take the fun out of moments of whimsy.

Anyhow, so… yeah. Convention. The peak moment for me was when I was attending a Beatles Sing-A-Long panel where one of the musicians was none other than Spider Robinson. Getting to sing along to Beatles tunes would have been awesome enough. Having Spider Robinson there made it even better.

But the truly peak moment came when, during a Beatles song that usually ends with a flute playing, another congoer surprised us all by filling in for the flute via whistling so expertly that it sounded like birdsong.

After the song finished, I said “That’s the version they did with the Byrds, right? ”

And everyone laughed. But most importantly, Spider laughed like hell, and that maakes me feel so damned good.

Because not only did I make an author whose books have both made me laugh and touched me on a personal level LAUGH…. but I did it with a PUN.

Those of you who are familiar with his Callahan’s books will appreciate just how much that means to me.

Plus, I networked for the first time! And it went very well!

See, I went to a panel to where one fo the guests, a guy named Kieth Merrill, introduced himself as being from the movie business and that he had won an Academy Award..

Well, I decided, this seems like a very good person to know for a  budding writer like me. Granted, I am going into TV, not film, but still. I Know Someone now.

So I approached him once the panel was over, and introduced myself as a film school student of the writing sort, and he was kind enough to talk to me, even take me aside for a few minutes after the panel and talk to me.

But that, as it turned out, was only Level One.

See, the next day, I was at a panel about religion in science fiction, and I got up to talk about how secular scientism can’t replace religion because religion does so much more for people than merely provide a cosmology. This quite frankly bewildered some of the panelists, who looked at me like I was speaking some kind of moon language.

But another of the panelists was Kieth Merrill, who, as it turns out, is a rare Christian conservative in the movie biz, and he was very impressed by my passionate defense of faith. He actually said to me, “You’re obviously a man of faith and passion…”

I had to disabuse him of that notion. I am not yet such a shark that I could lie, even passively, about a thing like that.

But I nevertheless think I made a very good impression on him. Such a good impression  that I am thinking of emailing him (I just HAPPENED to note his email addy when he was giving it to someone else) and thanking him for his kind attention.

And who knows where that might lead?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.