Today was better than yesterday because I had something to do.

Namely, therapy. I had my first therapist’s session in a month today. It went all right.

I mean, no huge breakthroughs. Just my therapist telling me things I already know but nevertheless needed someone to tell me because that’s just how brains work sometimes. Things we hear from others seem more real to us than the knowledge in our heads, and in this case, I needed someone to tell me to take sleep more seriously, goddamn it.

I might be paraphrasing a little on that last bit.

And of course, as you wonderful folk know, I already know this. I’ve explained it here. I think my lack of quality sleep is the major cause of how my mental acuity deteriorates over the term and how I need to make some major changes in my life if I don’t want to end up in a semi-vegetative state in a month or so.

Which means both getting more sleep and better quality sleep. I can see that more clearly now that I have had a couple of days of no pressure and no alarm clock. This business with only getting five hours of sleep on the nights when I have class in the morning has got to go. There has to be a workable solution.

But it’s complicated. I also treasure my time watching the Daily Show et. al. with Joe, and he doesn’t get home until around 12:30. Plus there’s those nights when Felicity is over.

If it wasn’t for that, I would just go to bed at 11 pm like a sane person. But I am loath to remove my main form of socialization from my life.

I could try to get three hours of sleep before Joe gets home. Dinner at 6, blogging between 7 and 9, 9-12 naptime… the number work out.

But that would leave me little time to relax and have fun. By which I mean play video games and chat with the fuzzies, of course.

But that would only apply on days when I I have class till 4. And during the next term, that will only apply on… some of the days.

Damn am I getting frustrated with the lack of regularity in VFS’s calendar.

I had this great idea : to input all my classes for the whole term into my little student calendar app so I would always have the schedule in my pocket, and not only that, in a form that integrates with the rest of the program so that I could put in my homework and my courses all fit together.

And to be honest, anything that makes it faster and easier to input my homework would be extremely welcome. I realized today that one of the main things that leads to me to slipping into not inputting my homework is that said homework is given in class and I have to take my attention away from the class to input stuff (because I am not a multitasker) and then I fall behind in the class and have to figure out what I missed when I was inputting.

And that’s very stressful.

That leads to my strong stance on instructors putting EVERYTHING on Moodle. When it’s on Moodle, I can check it and get my coursework suggestions there, in a permanent medium, as opposed to it just being words in air and if you missed something, tough.

I never do well when there’s no room for error. I’m an error prone dude.

Anyhow, so I go to input the classes only to find out that the program I have been assumes that you will have a single, regular weekly schedule so it only lets you input classes by day of the week.

Well VFS don’t play that. I’m lucky if I have the same schedule two weeks in a row. That’s not been a huge deal in the past because I had no desire to make things regular as long as I knew what class I had next and when.

But now it’s beginning to bug me. And not just because it apparently means I need to find a new student calendar app. Having a regular weekly schedule would make it so much easier to plan ahead for things like, just to pick a random example, regular visits to one’s desperately needed therapist.

Oh well. According to the schedule as it is written right now, I mostly have Wednesdays off. That will have to do.

Been thinking about the “former child prodigy” thing again today. I really feel like part of me is stuck in the past, trying to recreate that golden time when everyone was so impressed with me and I got oodles of praise and validation from all the adults around me.

And all for stuff I found easy!

But the thing is, life is never going to be that easy again. That time is gone and it’s never coming back. My life as it is now is not some temporary thing I have to endure in order to get back to The Way It Should Be. It’s the real thing. Being an adult. Far out.

No wonder so many of us former child prodigies have a lot of negative feelings about the prospect of growing up. We understand that once we become grownups, that last chance we had of going back to being a child prodigy is gone forever.

When you are an adult, nobody is impressed by how smart you are any more. Even if you are unarguably bright, way above average, nobody cares. Nobody is going to praise you for your intrinsic qualities any more.

What matters is what you can do. What you can produce. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I understand the temptation to rail against a world that seems hard and scary and cruel, but all the world is asking for is what you expect of others. That they do their job.

After all, if you go to the pharmacy to get your prescription filled, does it really matter if the pharmacist is really smart and a nice guy if he or she can’t fill your prescription?

No, it doesn’t. What you want is for people to produce for you the results you want.

And that’s what the world expects of you, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.