Convalesces! Wow, I spelled it right the first time. Gold star!

Anyhow, the convalescing in question refers both to spirit and body.

The spirit you know about : recovering from being workshopped. I think I am coming along quite well on that front. I am reminding myself that my main strength is writing very funny dialogue, and so if I missed some stuff in the plot, no big deal.

Nobody watches a sitcom for the plot anyhow.

And I know damned well that if I can make myself take in all or most of the good feedback I got on Monday, I will be able to make my story much stronger during the outline stage.

But that’s still very hard for me. My process is so deeply internal that it is very hard for me to open it up and make changes. I am not the sort of writer that takes input easily, or rather, I take it easily but then totally disregard it.

And there is virtually no form of writing save self-publishing where you will not, at some point, have to take in feedback and make changes.

Even the lonely novelist in his garret, typing his heart and soul into the pages and tearing himself apart with his insatiable drive for perfection as he does rewrite after rewrite, eventually has to submit his work to a publisher, who will then assign an editor, who will tell the lonely novelist what changes to make.

I am fairly certain that in that case, I would not have a problem making the changes required of me. After all, it’s just part of the job. Same if I was a writer on a TV show. Boss says to change X Y and Z? Sure thing!

But at school, the whole idea is for me to learn, and that means changing how I think and create, and that involves some intimate tinkering with story engine about which I am quite hesitant and squeamish.

It really does feel like I am poking around in my guts sometimes.

I suppose that’s the downside to both coming at this as an older person and coming at this as someone who had a lot of practice writing before coming to school : in both cases, it resulted in a lack of flexibility in my methodology and difficulty in adapting input into my creativity, at least on a conscious level.

On a subconscious level, I am sure that I have become a much better writer for my schooling. Everything is so much clearer and more purposeful and I have a better perception of what a story is and what it should be than ever before.

So if all my blogging was like working out at the gym, my education at VFS has been like training with a coach.

But I still want more. When it comes to writing, my ambition knows no limit. I am going to write the best stuff around or die trying. I hope to write for TV shows for long enough to make a really good impression with my skill, then move on to being head writer somewhere, and eventually to creating and producing shows of my own.

Like Dan Harmon.

One stereotypically slapdash no-effort meal later…

The other side of the coin of my health issues is that I have been having trouble with my IBS lately. Saturday afternoon was more terrible than usual and I was having identical troubles in class today.

I don’t need a third point to decide that that’s a trend.

And it didn’t take me long to figure out why I was getting bound up then having to defecate A LOT, which is never a good thing when you have IBS. It’s because I have been neglecting my water intake lately.

So I am choosing to view this interlude as an educational and experimental one. The question was, do I really need to drink as much water as I usually do?

And the answer was “yes!“.

Good to know that I have been doing the right thing by drinking lots of water like I do. It helps to touch base with the reasons why you do things sometimes.

Clogged the toilet at school today.

When elimination does not occur when it should, the matter in question can achieve a certain density that is the bane of most toilets due to internal compression.

Luckily, most people never have to learn this, assuming they have healthy diets and aren’t wired in a way that their emotions go right to their guts.

I mean, people talk about eating their emotions, but with me, it’s vice versa. And likewise.

I swear to God, that makes sense.

Otherwise, it’s been an uneventful day. Had a meeting with my film group. Still not too happy with the lack of a sense of urgency or importance to the whole thing. I am, by nature, a worrier, and I solve that worry with planning and forethought. My continuous assumption is that the world is full of little details looking to trip you up because you did not anticipate them, and the only solution is to try to anticipate everything.

This causes a certain degree of stress, but it’s also one of my more “winner” attributes because it’s people like me who rule the world. Kinda. At the very least, it’s a very good set of attributes to have if you want to succeed in life, because while others fall into pitfall after pitfall, you are nimbly dodging them and taking advantage of the competition’s lack of foresight and planning.

It does wonders for you in business, I am sure. It’s this sort of neurotic need to make variables into constants through contingency planning that turns an average person into a system (or empire) builder.

It can even make a slow responder like me seem like a swift, decisive leader who can make important decisions with confidence and without hesitation.

But only if we’ve thought it out beforehand.

Let’s keep that our little secret, shall we?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had my beat sheet for ep 1 of Sam workshopped in TV Pilot class today, which means I am in the process of reassembling my self-worth.

It gets easier every time. I know the route back. It’s not that it was terrible, it’s just that it could be improved, everything can be made better, look at all the amazing notes you got, and so forth and so on.

So while I do feel a tad beat up right now, it doesn’t worry me. Everybody goes through this and we come out better writers for it, and I realized today that becoming a better writer is something I desire almost above all else.

And wow, do I have a treasure trove of improvements to make to my beat sheet. I am going to try to force myself to fix the beat sheet before starting work on the outline, which is the next phase.

I am not totally sure about what goes into this sort of outline. I know we learned it at one point but that was a long time ago. So I have emailed my teacher about it after ascertaining that there was no explanation readily available on Moodle.

All I remember is that it involved sluglines (you know, like INT. PRIVATE EYE’S OFFICE – DAY) and describing what happens in each scene. But I feel like there must be more to it than that, otherwise it wouldn’t be all that different than the beat sheet.

A little more detailed, I suppose. More like an episode, certainly.

Maybe I do know the difference and I just forgot I knew. This is the sort of thing that happens in a busy and complicated mind like mine.

It’s like an overtaxed post office. Nobody wants to make mistakes but with so much coming in and going out, even a very low error rate produces a substantial number of errors, big and small.

Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself in order to stave off the feelings that I might be mentally incompetent on some level, and need to live in a senior’s home for the incurably absentminded. The kind of place with huge clocks with big numbers and the date and day of the week displayed in the middle, and nice people who say things like, “Hello MICHAEL! Today is TUESDAY… do you know what that means?”

Nah, I’d be too sarcastic for that. “Yeah, it means yesterday was Monday! Now stop talking like an imbecile and show me my datebook. ”

I am really looking forward to the day I look old enough to get away with not censoring myself. I already have the confused look of the mentally lost. Some gray hairs and the occasional chicken noise would be all it took to convince people I have dementia.

And I would only be half lying, to be honest.

Anyhoo, I will start work on my outline tomorrow or maybe later tonight. This time I will remember that is it due Friday, not Monday.

It can be my big project for Wednesday, after I get back from therapy and getting my phone activated at the mall and such.

Today’s been uneventful besides class. Still paying $8/day to get to n’ from school. That shit has to stop soon. But I am waiting on some stupid letter.

From the government. Oy.

I wish I could just bill them for the money lost. I mean, if they had an ounce of compassion, or at least common sense, they would provide people in my situation with compensation. It’s not like disabled people have a lot of spare cash lying around.

Who knows, that might even be possible. I should look it up.

It sucks that it takes this long to get a new card anyhow. Ironically, if I was paying for the thing myself, I would probably have a new card within a couple of business days. Because then, I would be a customer.

But no, the government has stuck its schnoz into this issue for some reason, and that means it takes two week or more to get the card.

What if I was some old lady who needed the card to get to her doctor’s appointments? What if I was the victim of a terrible car crash who needed the card to get to physio? What if I was someone with kidney disease and needed the card to get to dialysis?

But no, I am just some degenerate lunatic who can just fucking wait.

Not that I’m bitter.

Actually, scratch that. I’m bitter as hell. Bitter about my wasted live, bitter about my rotten childhood, bitter about having to start my life at 43, you name it. I’m pissed off.

I am even pissed off about the fact that some of my problems are my own fault! How fair is that? I am only trying to survive, just like everybody else. Cut me some freaking slack.

I’m pissed off that I have more than 20 years of frozen emotions and impulses and drives to thaw out and it is taking freaking forever.

I’m pissed off that it seems like no matter how hard I try, I can never get ahead. Everything I gain means something else I lost. The end product is the same as if I had done nothing at all. Which means I am actually down because there’s all the effort I expended.

I’m pissed off that age has made me slower than the other students and that I have to run to keep up in class while they only walk.

I’m pissed off at my own inability to get and stay organized. I know us creative types tend to not need a lot of order in our lives but it’s getting ridiculous.

In fact, I am just plain pissed off with having to deal with myself all the time. I am so hard to deal with sometimes!

And finally, I am pissed off that I have made it through 3 and 3/4 terms and I still feel like it’s up in the air whether I am worth anything at all.

Honestly, I could go either way on that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had one of my periods of intense dreaming, the kind that leaves me sweaty an exhausted and all messed up in the head, this morning.

In my dream, I was arguing with some woman – a pretty face ugly soul type – and at one point she turns to this other guy and says “Kick his ass!”.

Now this guy is small. Like, 5′ 6″ small. And round like a teddy bear. He’s wearing glasses and suspenders. Now he doesn’t want to do it at first, but Resting Bitch Life there shoves some money at him and says “Now I’m paying you this money, so you go and do it!”.

And I am like, “Aw, come on. I don’t wanna fight this guy. Be reasonable. ” But she is having none of it and pushes the little dude into fighting me.

Now this is where things split. Because on one level I am fighting him physically but on another I am fighting him in a rap battle.

Sadly, I wasn’t really rap battling him, it was more like the idea of it was happening and I was, naturement, winning. It;s too bad that it wasn’t really happening though, I bet I was totally dropping dope rhymes to a sick-ass beat at a mike-drop level.

I’m very white.

Anyhow, all the poor guy was doing was smiling a “don’t kill me” kind of smile at me as I held him by the lapels. I was not proud of what was going on but I felt helpless to stop it. Like it was a process that had to run its course before I had free will again.

That, sadly, is pretty much it. No denouement, unless “And then I woke up. ” counts. I really wish I had hung around long enough to give that bitch her comeuppance, possibly by turning her champion against her and teaming up on her.

Hopefully, in the rap battle sense only.

It would make a pretty cool scene, or maybe a short film. I’d have to actual write the battle raps, of course, but still. I could totally do that.

I might not be able to come up with hard hitting rap lyrics on the fly, but give me a minute.

After a dream like that, I can understand why so many religions put great significance on dreams. It still feels to me like something that actually happened, but not in the same sense as the rest of my life.

More like it happened in another realm. One that is no less powerful for being entirely subjective. It’s an emotional reality rather than a physical one, and one where the emotions are raw and on the surface and being expressed as rapidly as they can be expressed given the limits of my mental aperture.

Which is the point, I imagine. I have these intense dreams when I need to express deep emotions that I suppress when conscious. It’s far from fun, but it generally cleanses as it burns away a lot of mental debris.

So it works out for the better in the long run.

In the meantime, however, it makes me want to freaking hibernate. I’ve slept for nine hours today and I still need more. I guess I am entering one of my sleepy phases, more’s the pity. I have things I want to get done today!

Instead, I am going to end up spending still more time in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Hopefully, if I lean in hard enough, I will pop out the other side soon enough to actually get that beatsheet done before class tomorrow.

Oh fuck, I just realized : class is Monday, which means it was actually due yesterday. Saturday, I’ve gone and fucked up again.

I get so damned sick of myself sometimes.

Oh well, I will have to finish it this afternoon and pray that it won’t invalidate things that I am a day late. How can I keep forgetting this little rule? People need to have at least two days to read the thing and prepare notes before class. I fell into thinking that things were due in class again. God, I am such a space case!

Well, then, that’s the plan. I am going to take a short nap then I am going to work like hell to get the damned thing done ASAP. I might not get the marks but I will at least get the workshopping. And that means something.

Oh, and I am supposed to have a list of five production-relevant people and their contact info for Producing for Writers on Tuesday.

That is just plain not going to happen. I don’t know anybody. I am not friends with any of my classmates, so I can’t get anything that way. I don’t know anyone in the industry, so I can’t get things that way. And I have been told there is no place online I can go to look.

And I can’t just cold class people. My social anxiety precludes it. In fact, this whole thing is driving my social anxiety level through the roof. And that’s compounded by the fact that I feel like I am about to be punished for being an involuntary loner and there is nothing I can do about it.

Maybe that dream of mine was my attempt to wrestle with the issue. I dunno.

Oh, and to top it all off, we already have all the people we need, or at least the rest of my film group thinks we do. I have my serious doubts but I am clearly not going to convince them to take this shit more seriously and not just assume it will be easy.

They want to shoot in someone’s tiny apartment even though this is a movie made up of a memory montage made of many, many short scenes? Sure, what the fuck.

Oh, and each scene will require a change of clothes (where will the actors change? dunno) and a new setup, and possibly an entirely new camera angle.

What could possibly be wrong?

What do I care? I won’t even be there!

Worst case scenario, I refuse my producer credit. Fuck it. As desperate as I am to get credits at this point in my life, a credit on a real stinker can be worse than no credit at all.

I will continue to try to get them to focus, but if it all goes to hell, it ain’t my fault.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now.

Not in a bad way, mind you. It’s just one of those points in the juggling act that is my life where all the balls are in the air at the same time without my hand touching any of them.

Like when you’re on the swings as a kid and there’s that moment between swings when you are weightless and motionless.

That was always my favorite part of the swings when I was a kid. Those little moments when you aren’t swinging in either direction, you’re just… suspended.

That’s how I feel right now. And it’s kind of nice. It’s a little stressful because I am in the middle of a major piece of homework – the beatsheet for the pilot for my animated sitcom Sam – and I have done the plotline for the one story I have totally fleshed out in my head, and now I have to think of two more. ^[1]

I have two more from back in term 2, but one of them is a “Sam gets a new friend” episode and I don’t want two of those in my pilot episode. He meets his best friend in the first segment and I want to add to the cast slowly so I have time to develop Sam further.

Originally, I thought the format for my show was going to be two 11 minute stories. Then my teacher and classmates helped me decide that I should do the show as fifteen minute episodes and aim it at kids a la Adventure Time.

It will make it a lot more marketable than the strange hybrid beast I had in mind, and it would allow me to have tightly focused episodes without subplots, which is what I want.

But now I sit down to do the beatsheet, and I do what I think will be the first half of the first episode, only to realize it’s only seven beats long.

That suggests that what I will actually end up with is a standard three act half-hour sitcom structure and while there is nothing wrong with that, it’s so far from where I started out that I am left a little dazed by the transition.

But what the heck, a familiar format will help sell it too.

So that’s one thing I am in the middle of, and the biggest of them. But I kind of feel that way about the time of year we are in too. It’s not quite the Xmas season yet, despite what retailers are trying to tell us^[2], but the days are getting very short and there’s a feeling of transition in the air as fall inevitably shades into winter.

And it’s kind of nice, in a way. Certainly, it gives me things to look forward to, and those are vital to my mental health. It should be a very good Xmas for me, for various reasons, and until then I have school to keep me busy.

And I have learned to enjoy that feeling of accelerated time that comes with age. I know it’s an illusion and that the minutes are passing at a minute per minute just like always, and so I don’t get upset and feel like yelling at everything to slow the fuck down.

At least, not yet.

And the great thing about accelerated time sense is that it never feels like I have all that long to wait for stuff. When I was younger, Xmas would seem like it’s a long way off from right now, despite it being less than a month until.

But now, it truly feels like it’s just around the corner. And the same goes for my education. I can’t believe that I am more than half way through my fourth term already. The weeks seem to go past like pages in a book and when I graduate on April 30, it will truly seem like the whole thing was a pleasant interlude on the way to becoming a real life adult.

That’s quite cool.

So while I am not exactly thrilled about being over the hill and gaining speed and I am really not keen on accelerating ever faster towards the grave, it has its advantages.

Of course, there’s another important transition taking place. Trump “transitioning” into being the Preside of the U S of A.

It’s not going well. His future cabinet is shaping up to be a basket full of losers. There’s not a one of them that seems like an A-List type. They are all lightweights without a thing going for them. I mean, when the smartest person in the group is Newt Gingrich, you have some serious fucking problems.

Then again, brains were never the issue with Newt. It was his weak and unstable personality that makes him trip over his own dick over and over again.

I hope Trump’s collection of assholes realizes that he won’t listen to them. If they think that being one of his “advisors” will give them power, they are tragically mistaken. He doesn’t listen to anyone because age has made him too stupid (where it counts) to take in new information and his ego convinces him that he knows “enough” at all times.

Sadly, they will still be the heads of various parts of the US government, but I am pretty sure that an agile bureaucrat will be able to keep them from actually doing damage to the country while leaving them free to damage themselves and the government they are part of with what they say as much as they want.

Never thought I would be rooting for the Sir Humphreys of the world to win!

A lot of the doom and gloom being forecast by hysterical liberals presumes competence and intention. I don’t think Trump’s monkey show will have either.

They can still do a lot of damage accidentally, Dubya’s regime taught us that. so I am not saying it is sunny skies ahead for the US and the world.

I am just saying we would be far worse off if that clown car of cabinet cronies had someone competent as ringleader.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am wrestling with the notion that I just might not be able to relate to normal people. Or even most above-average people. I have grown strange in the dark cold wilderness of my icy exile, and it might be that there’s an uncrossable gap between me and most people.

I was thinking about this as I ate my lunch at Bob’s today. ^[1] I was listening in on the conversation of the four working class dudes at the table next to me (my rule is, if I can hear it without turning my head, it’s fair game) and it was making me wonder just what was wrong with me that I had trouble connecting with people like that.

They all seemed like happy, healthy, decent fellows. Their conversation wasn’t something I couldn’t understand. One of the guys was telling stories about his days on what I deduced was a hockey team, and the various shenanigans he’d gotten up to, into, and instigated when he was a younger man.

Arguably, all it would take is a table read of that paragraph to illustrate one of the reasons I would have trouble connected with people like that : how I talk.

Normal people don’t use the word “shenanigans”.

But this isn’t about that. Sure, I am painfully middle class and I am sure to these men I would sound like Little Lord Fauntelroy, but I don’t hold myself to be above them in any sense. I liked their conversation. In an abstract sense, I wishes I could join in.

But I know that if I did, I would have the same old problem : people staring at me like I just grew a dick out of my forehead and it’s addressing them by name. The only way I could stay in a conversation like that is to shut the fuck up and say nothing, and while I am capable of doing that, my overall eagerness to connect with people and strong desire to speak and be heard would make it stressful.

Is it my IQ? Every time say that, I feel like I am humble-bragging. “Golly, is the problem that I am JUST TOO MASSIVELY INTELLIGENT? Darn. ”

But it’s been a problem since my first day of school. I know I keep going on an on about it but it’s kind of a huge issue in my life.

And I feel like every time I talk it out on these sad little pages of mine, I get a little bit closer to being able to accept the truth of it all.

I guess my recent radical disappointment with how my film group is turning out gave me some of the push I needed to move a little closer to my goal. I was so pissed off and so goddamned sick of trying to fit in that it gave me some much needed distance from the whole thing and gave me some perspective.

And I am all about the perspective.

So I feel like I am closer to accepting the idea that I might have to relate to people as a person who is smarter than they are. It still sticks in my craw to even say it, but it’s something I need to face nevertheless.

There has to be a way to both know your are smarter than people while also a) not beating yourself up about your inability to connect and b) not end up sounding (or feeling) condescending, patronizing, or smug.

But how does a high IQ person deal with less smart people except as children? that’s the big barrier for me. If I truly accept that I am substantially smarter than average folk, the world because one huge Special Ed class to me.

Do you have any idea how goddamned terrifying that is?

Plus I think my socially starved childhood has a lot to do with it. I connected with others so infrequently that the thought of distancing myself from others even further seems like unthinkable madness. It’s the exact sort of thing that leads emotionally desperate people to stay in abusive relationships because they are terrified of being alone again.

The thing is, though, is that I am already cut off from others. It’s not like getting further away would make much of a difference. And it might just be that by accepting my role as a Smart Guy, the resolution of that key inner conflict might go a long way towards making me a saner, more grounded, more relaxed person.

Which in turn might make me a lot easier to relate to. Accomplit.

But I am not quite there yet, I am closer than I have ever been, but I still can’t imagine, in any sense, looking down on people. Even if it’s just intellectually and I am still completely egalitarian in every other way.

The very idea of it fills me with a cold and clammy nausea.

But some day, I will be able to make peace with the whole thing. It won’t be easy. I know it will make me feel detached from everyone who can’t keep up with me , at least for a while.

It will, in fact, make me feel the urge to manipulate people. Maybe that’s what I am really afraid of : my own dark side. I know that deep within my oral-retentive soul is an urge to arrange my world strictly to feed my own needs and to hell with the damage to others.

And that high IQ means I could do it, too. And that’s when I would truly lose my soul. That kind of existence would be like spiritual annihilation to me. I’d still be alive but I wouldn’t be truly human any more.

I might still end up there if I get some success in life. I hope not. I am keenly aware of the perils of decadence, especially for someone like me who is both oral-retentive and has had very little in the way of cash in his life.

Still, I at least know there’s a time when self-indulgence stops working and you have to move on to something higher or you will fall apart.

That’s more than a lot of people know going into the world, I suppose.

Maybe I will get to keep my soul after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry folks, I used up all my writing calories on homework. I will be back tomorrow.

Therapy today. It helped me bring together a few of the strands of thought that I have been working on lately.

Yesterday, I was mad at the people in my film group for not noticing me and acting like I don’t exist and so forth and so on.

I’ve also discussed how good I am at hiding my problems from the world and how, in general, the message I send out to the world is “I’m fine!”.

It occurred to me in therapy today that these two things might be connected.

Due to my acute social anxiety, most of the time, I go around cloaked. I fade into the background terrified of being noticed and having my envelope of silent anonymity shattered. I even feel that way at home sometimes. Decloaking type events have to be planned well in advance so that I can be ready to let my guard down. It’s the sort of thing that takes a lot of emotional preparation on my part.

Having it happen suddenly is absolutely out of the question.

And the irony is that it’s not like I am bad at open social interaction. I can be quite dynamic and charming and witty in the right milieu.But the cringing and skulking habits run deep, and on a deep level I still feel like my only hope for safety is to pass unnoticed.

And then…. and then I sit there and bitterly complain that nobody notices me, people treat me like I don’t exist, and nobody cares about my deep pain, isolation, and loneliness.

Well they can’t care about what they don’t see! I do such a skillful job of hiding that I can’t very well fault people for not seeing through my brilliant disguise.

No, I’m not going to embed the video for that song. Google it yourself.

So in that sense, it’s my own fault that I got the shaft yesterday in film group. I hide most of the time. It’s a reflex, like a chameleon changing colors. If I want to really shine in the world, I am going to have to learn to come out of my shell and be emotionally present in the world instead of peering at it through a thick one way mirror.

So the question becomes : how to stop hiding.

It’s a tricky one because the answer is clearly not going to be some rational “this one weird trick will end your social isolation reflex forever” type thing. I do it because I don’t feel safe. And one of the reasons I don’t feel safe is because I am in so much pain from my freaking social isolation.

It’s not quite a Catch-22, but it’s close. A Catch-21. Or at least a Catch-20.

It almost makes me want to dabble in illegal drugs. If I could artificially lower my defenses in a controlled manner, I theoretically could get some of the positive social input I would need to feel safe and that might help me heal.

But that would be a tricky proposition, because whatever drug I used might also interfere with my ability to process the necessary emotions to make it stick, and so instead of becoming a saner person I would end up a “social drinker” or its equivalent.

And then I would slide right into addiction. I know this for a rock solid fact. Give me a way to escape my emotions and I will be using it all the fucking time.  So I don’t go there.

Besides, I wouldn’t need any illegal drugs, seeing as pot is practically legal here. I might try pot for that, seeing as it is not physically addictive and it doesn’t exactly produce euphoria, and has no depressant effect.

It just makes you feel pretty groovy for a while. That might be psychologically addictive, but it’s not like you can OD on pot. It’s not like pot destroys your liver or your lungs.

Worst case scenario, it just turns you into a giggly dumbass with no ambition. That’s not a desirable state – I have been useless and directionless and in the doldrums for too long.

But if it helped me cope… why the fuck not?

Anyhow, the point is, I have a bigger problem than my petty bitterness. I am the otter of my own fate, however unwittingly, and nothing is going to change until I resolve the conflict between wanting to be noticed and wanting to be invisible.

If I can get a hold of myself, calm my nerves, steady myself, and go out into the world with shields down and energy up, I might be able to bring some springtime sunshine and some rains to my cracked and craggy frostbitten heart.

That’s the solution. That’s the key to my ice fortress. That’s my route out of the labyrinth I generate specifically to stay lost in because it keeps the outside world at bay. It’s the map I need to step off the endless tundra within into the Southlands of my soul.

I know this now. And God willin’, I will not forget. That will not be easy. This is exactly the sort of thing my mind rejects, buries, and spins up a host of demons and complications and other diversions so I can distract myself long enough to forget where it lies. It does this because this knowledge threatens to upset the existing order.

But I have full conscious knowledge of what I need to do, and armed with that, I can fight. I can use my sledgehammer of rage to crush and destroy the machinery of my self-defeat. I can use the sword of my incisive intellect to cleave my demons in twain. And I can use the sunshine in my soul to melt the ice around my heart and bring a much-delayed spring to the Northlands of my heart.

The world’s really not such a bad place, you know. It’s full of bright, warm things that make your soul feel good. You just have to lower the drawbridge and let them in.

C’mon in, everybody. There’s food and drink and every kind of sex inside.

All I ask is that you don’t break anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had my first production meeting with my film group today. It did not go well, at least from my point of view.

Today, I had Producing for Writers class, aka  “Here’s some money, now fuck off” class. From today onward, every class will be half instruction and half production meeting with our teams. I like this, it makes sure we get together at least once a week and, to be honest, I would rather be in a production meeting than attending a lecture. Erk.

So in the first half of the class, the lecture part, I was stoked. I had all these ideas I wanted to contributed and I had already figured out what roles I could fill in the production and was imagining myself as the focused executive type who run things with a Picard-like efficiency and sweeps the others off their feet with my judgment and wisdom.

I consider myself to be a natural executive, as are many other INTJ types. We can make decisions rapidly, handle the big picture with ease, keep a big system in our heads (as long as we designed it) and we are independent of mind enough to make the tough decisions that benefit the system as a whole and thereby the people in it.

So I had built up quite a picture of how it was going to go down by the time the meeting actually came around. I would smoothly and unobtrusively assert control, get everyone on the same page, and sort out who has to do what, when, and where.

I knew I could be a  great asset when it came down to coordinating, planning, organizing, communication, and so on. I can handle paperwork and budgets and forms and big huge documents with everything in them and all that kind of thing.

I figured that those would be the sort of things that none of my fellow artsy people would want to touch with an eleven foot stick, and so the role would be mine, uncontested.

But obviously, that’s not how it worked out. To my surprise, when we were handing out the jobs, another member of my group spoke up and claimed my positions, and I was too stunned to object, so boom, there goes my role.

And I was not really suited for any of the other roles. And when they/we were deciding those other roles, people, as usual, totally forgot I existed, so it’s not like anyone said “Michael, can you do that?” to me.

Even in my stunned state, I would have know to say “yes”. No matter what it was.

So now I feel excluded and walled off in my own film group. The only job I got was craft services, which I can totally do, but I can’t help but think of as a waste of my talents when I could be doing so much more.

And I can’t shake the feeling that I never stood a chance. That the whole thing was programmed against me from the start, including the fact that the first meeting was announced on such short notice that there was absolutely no chance I could attend.

These people never planned to include me at all, and if they let me do anything at all, it’s out of pity. I could be an incredible asset to them, but they don’t know that or don’t care.

Well fuck them, then. I’ll do my job and contribute at meetings (assuming they listen to me at all, which is improbable) but it’s clear the clique has already formed and I am not part of it, so I officially don’t give a shit about the project any more.

They don’t want me, they don’t get me. It basically means I have to do very little work on production day – in fact, they strongly hinted that I don’t even need to show up. So fuck these people. If it wouldn’t get me in trouble, I would leave them all to hang in the breeze without my strength, wisdom, and forethought to help them.

And one day they will look up and shout “Save us!” and I’ll look down and whisper, “No.”

Not really. I am too Canadian for that, and therefore I am unable to knowingly let down the team. I am also too aware of the world and my responsibilities within it to do that. I would swallow my pride and help if they came to me.

But they probably won’t.

I swear to God, though, that some day I am going to force the world to value me. Hopefully in large denominations, and plenty of them. I haven’t even tapped into a tenth of my potential yet. I have powers I don’t even know I have yet. And I am capable of great growth if given even a tiny amount of encouragement.

So far, I have not gotten said encouragement in sufficient quantity. I know from my teachers that I am pretty damned good at writing. I don’t need the approval or inclusion of my classmates in order to do my job.

One day, someone is going to give me a chance to shine, and I will knock their fucking socks off with all my creative and pragmatic powers. I’m a greater writer, plus I have all kinds of other skills that could benefit others to an astounding degree.

And I’ll tell you this : my fellow students are going to notice a subtle difference in me from now on. I will still be friendly and civil, but a glass wall is going up between me and them from now on. I am tired of trying to fit in and get along. I am officially doing my own thing now, and if it happens to benefit others, great.

If people want to connect with me, it will be on my own terms. Otherwise, that wall is not coming down for any reason. I am my own beast now.

And some day, by God, I will shake the very heavens with my power.

Until then, I will keep my thunder to myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I came to realization today that I am simply not keeping up at school.

It was obvious once the idea had formed. It just took a long time to form because my mind rejected the idea out of hand.

What, me not keeping up with the class? That’s unpossible! I’m Michael Bertrand, the guy who was always light years ahead of the class even in UPEI. I’m the guy who got super bored in class because he absorbed the information instantly and others needed repetition in different modes.

Surely I could not ever be someone who struggles to keep up. Not me. ^[1]

But the evidence was there all along. It’s why I found it so hard to speak up in workshopping classes, a fact I even noted weeks before making this realization. I simply can’t keep up with the conversation and all the ideas and raw creativity flying around and come up with things to say at the same time. It’s one or the other most of the time.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t contribute in class. I do, despite the fact that often my ideas bounce off people’s heads like a poorly aimed Skee-Ball, and in my saner moments I admit that it’s not that I don’t contribute enough.

But it’s all pretty hard work. I feel like I am jogging to keep up with people who are walking. There’s just too much going on in my head these days from evenry single new item for me to spare the CPU cycles for anything else.

Obviously, age is the primary factor. When I was the same age as the other students, I was bristling with mental energy and nothing in the world of the mind happened fast enough for me. Even normal conversation with intelligent people was too slow. I would have found workshopping to be amazing fun and not a drag at all.

And don’t get me wrong, I still love doing it. But it takes so much more energy because every item added drags with it the heavy weight of all the associations and connects that have to me made in order to integrate it into my existing worldview.

Makes me tired just thinking about it, really.

I guess that his how raw intelligence turns into crystallized intelligence over time. The brain fills up and the sheer maintenance on your enormous database takes up more and more of your mind’s processor.

So we slow down in many ways as we get older. I wonder how it would feel if we had the option to delete all the boring times from our memories. Times with little or no information content, in other words, not worth remembering.

Basically, a lossless compression of the contents of our minds. Hmmm. That would make an interesting episode of Black Mirror.

I am sure it would be enormously invigorating and possibly even therapeutic. I can see it helping for people with brain damage of various sorts by giving their broken systems less to have to deal with. It would probably help mental illness too, for the same reason.

But what would the long term effects be? Maybe people’s sense of time and context would completely break down. Memories no longer in sequence, people would no longer be able to remember whether something happened 20 years ago or yesterday.

I can relate.

Anyhow, back to the subject. I am either too slow for some classes or damn near too slow. I should be grateful that I am going to school when I am, because a couple of years from now I might not be able to keep up at all.

This makes be worry about the TV writer’s room, though, I hope I can keep up there. If it’s just at conversational speed, there should be no problem. I can riff and be silly and so on with the best of them. And I know damn well that I come up with loads and loads of really good ideas, and they always need those. But if I have to deliver cogent analysis on the fly, it might not work so well.

I might have to jettison tact and sensitivity to do it, and that’s not going to make for a pleasant work environment. Nobody wants to be exposed to my brutal honestly, especially given both my muscular powers of analysis and my talent for expressing the results of said analysis in precise, clinical tones with deadly accuracy.

I’m a sniper. That’s not good for human relations.

But it might be good if I want script analysis work, like writing treatments, or being a first reader for scripts, or doing punch-ups of a lackluster script, or such.

And that is definitely the kind of work you can do anywhere. So there’s that. Apparently it can be quite lucrative, especially if you are quick and reliable.

And I have no problems there. Need that script analysis ASAP? Send me the script, I will have it for you in two hours.

Only If suitably compensated, of course. . Honestly, I would love the challenge. There’s lot of mileage in me yet, it’s just that my top speed ain’t what it used to be.

Then again, what is?

So I dunno. I am glad I have other options should the world of TV writing be completely unwilling to hire a 43 year old. It’s a distinct possibility. They may assume I could not keep up. And they may be right.

I really want to be in that writer’s room, but if I end up just doing the script stuff with maybe a screenplay to try to sell, I would be content.

The main thing is that I can paid for using my talents. I want that so bad. Getting paid for what I do is a goal that shines for my like a new Jerusalem.

And I think I can do it.

Wish me luck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m a man of wealth and taste.

Wait, no. I’m a man of poverty and crudeness.

But maybe not forever.

I have been pondering things about my future lately. Specifically, about where I will end up after I graduate.

Like I have said before, I really really hope it’s Toronto instead of L.A. Well, technically, I hope it’s right here in the GVRD, but I am told that’s not too likely, so… Toronto.

I could do Toronto. I am sure it has some funky cool neighborhoods suitable for a sensitive artistic type like myself who prefer a laid back atmosphere. And if I am moving there for a job, I will have at least somewhat of a say in where I live.

As opposed to now, where I end up living wherever I end up, more or less.

It would be a challenge, to say the least, to live on my own again and end up having to do everything for myself. I’ve had Joe as my reality agent for so long that I wonder how rusty I have gotten. Not that I was very good at living on my own for the year or so I did it. But I was extremely depressed then.

And the odds are pretty good that I will end up living alone. I could look around TO for a roommate type situation, but that would be very challenging for my social anxiety. I would rather live alone than live with strangers. Don’t know if I could handle that.

Renting a room in a house might be doable. There’d be more room for people to spread out and have their own space, and I would of course spend most of my time in my room anyhow. So that might work.

And there would be something very comforting about living in a house again. In fact, it would be remarkably like my childhood, what with everyone doing their own thing and having their own rooms and often only meeting briefly in the common areas.

To me, that was normal. We were never a close family. And to be honest, I was the least close of them all because I was the forgotten one, the surprise, the accident.

So renting a room in a house, especially a large house, might suit me. I could socially assimilate with the others at my own pace. But definitely not a set of rando roommates in a small apartment where I would feel trapped.

Another possibility, I suppose, would be trying to contact the Toronto furry community and making friends with some Toronto furs long before I actually have to leave. That way, I might very well end up in a Furry household and living with people I at least know a little, which would go a long way to making me feel better about being in a new city.

And even if it didn’t result in a roommate situation, it would be nice to know a few people in the city anyhow so that I wouldn’t feel so alone.

But then again… I might end up in L.A.

Don’t want that. I didn’t like the idea of moving to the US before the recent election and I sure as hell don’t want to go now. But when you are starting out, you have to go where the work is, and most American TV is written in Los Angeles.

You might think that writing is the sort of job you can do anywhere, so why would I have to move? The answer is that the TV industry puts a lot of stock in having a writer’s room where all the writers collaborate, bounce idea off each other, hang out and shoot the breeze, and in general stimulate one another creatively.

And I am pretty sure being there via Skype would not be the same at all.

And no doubt, I am eager to be in one of these writer’s rooms. They sound awesome. Heck, I might even fit in there.

But I really don’t want to move to the States. Especially if I am going to be making a low wage. If I was pulling down the big bucks, I could insulate myself somewhat from all their galloping madness. But if I am living a street level existence, it would bum me out.

Plus, I would have to get a passport, which means a bunch of medical testing, and I would have to pay for health insurance, which would be nuts, and that health insurance would have to be pretty good to cover all the meds I take.

If necessary, I could jettison all my meds except for the two antidepressants, and hope for the best. Who knows, maybe working for a living would improve my blood sugar without having to take three different damn pills.

And I am sure there are good things about living in the City of Angels. For one thing, if it turns out I really do have some form of Seasonal Affective Disorder, a place where the sun shines all the time might be good for me.

I mean, I didn’t like it when I lived in Silicon Valley, but there, in the summer, everything died. Presumably, in a place where it is hot and sunny all year round, whatever lives there in terms of greenery either is adapted to the heat or lives off of sprinkler water.

Oh right. The drought. Lovely. They got rid of the smog (mostly) but now they have drought. What fun THAT would be.

I drink a LOT of water.

Still, I might just have to become an immigrant to the U S of A in order to get work in my chosen field of writing for TV.

I can see that leading to a fair number of political arguments if I don’t step cautiously. Must always remember that arguments aren’t important, especially around hotheaded Americans with little understanding of the world and access to firearms.

I have a feel that I could be a total show biz player if given the chance.

I just wish I didn’t have to “go Hollywood” to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.