It’s hard to believe that it was just 25 hours or so ago that I began this long and painful saga of frustration, humiliation, and spiritual growth the hard way.

See, I had a plan. I would do my presentation for Film Genre : Science Fiction and Fantasy about one of my favorite movies of all time, the Secret of NIMH. It would be a tribute to Mrs. Brisby’s enormous courage as one little mouse against a world that seems to be hell bent on killing her poor sick son Timmy.

I would just download the movie, clip out some scenes demonstrating her courage in the face of terrible danger which obviously terrifies her but she forges ahead anyhow because she has to save her son, put some text pages in between the clips to explain my thesis and make my case, and that would be the centerpiece of the PowerPoint presentation that was to be my  final project for said class.

The rest would be slides of facts about the movie, Don Bluth, etc.

Surely that wouldn’t take long. After all, I am a video whiz and this was a simple job. Half an hour in my trusted, ancient Ulead VideoStudio 11 and it would be done.

SO VERY WRONG.

First, Ulead 11 would not run. Its security certificates had expired or become corrupted and my OS was having none of its shit.

Well, that’s OK, I thought. I have this other video editor I downloaded a while back mainly because it was freeware and I have been trying to break my software piracy habit.

Turns out, I felt guilty about pirating software the whole time, but my greed for games masked it. It took a period without having pirated anything to make me realize that. Playing games I legitimately owned felt good.

So I try to use this goddamned thing, VSCD Free Video Editor, and it rapidly starts driving me crazy because it doesn’t work like any other video editor I have used and in ways that are mysterious, impenetrable, and faintly contemptuous of the user.

What the fuck is a “scene”? How do you define one? Is it just a clip or series of clips of media? Apparently not. All I wanted to do was clip some scenes from a movie, and it was giving me nothing but attitude. I fought that goddamned thing for an hour and a half before finally giving up and deciding to pirate a fresh copy of Ulead 11.

So I uninstall the old copy, download a torrent of it,  then decide that to prevent the problem I had with the old copy I will look up a patch, crack, serial number generator, or whatever other nefarious tool of software theft I need in order to fool my computer into thinking that I bought the software fair and square.

It’s a very old piece of software by now, and so I feel little guilt in pirating it. It’s not like Ulead is still making money off it. Not after they got bought out by Corel so that Corel could have their own video editing software.

So I find what looks to be what I am looking for, download it, and then I do something so colossally stupid that part of me still refuses to believe I actually did it despite having lived through the consequences of it.

I ran an unknown executable that came from a skeezy as hell website without even bothering to virus or malware scan it first.

I can only plead distraction. I was so focused on getting my presentation done that I was not being as vigilant as I should and I did something that I would never do in a million years and that I would have outright mocked if someone as computer-savvy as I had done it.

Anyhow, so I clicked, and boom, just like that, my computer was infected by a huge wad of malware that kept popping up windows trying to get me to download yet more sketchy software via various tricks like telling me my computer was infected by malware and only their sketch software could save me.

I admit, there’s a Machiavellian genius to that, plus a lot of chutzpah.

So now, just to use my computer, I have to shut down these fucking popups every minute or so, all because I made a very newb mistake.

I manage to get a bunch of work done on the video despite this, but eventually my nerves are shot and I go looking for a malware killer.

The first thing I notice is that my bookmark to Chrome is gone. Can’t have a victim like me using their web browser to download anti-malware software, right? So I look for a web based solution like they used to have, where you don’t have to download anything because it runs in your browser. No dice, that doesn’t exist any more.

Then I remember that I actually have a copy of Malwarebyte’s anti-malware software installed on my computer. My saviour! But when I ran it, it hung on the “updating database” phase, making it essentially useless.

Dammit, these bastards thought of everything.

Including blocking any attempt to download a different anti-malware program.

By now, I am on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I have been trying so hard to get my presentation start and it’s eating up enormous chunks of my time. I am battling popups constantly while trying to complete my video while evil software knocks down all my attempts to defeat it with contemptuous ease.

Luckily, eventually the Malwarebytes program managed to update its database and scan my system and rid it of nearly all of the malware.

But by the time that happened, I had very little time and energy left to actually do the motherfucking project. So I managed to finish the video… and that’s it.

Here it is (cringe!).

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/R7iHSHywjak” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

That is considerably below my standards and I had such high hopes for the video. I wanted to really show off my slick video editing skills, and instead, all I got was… *sigh* that slapped together piece of junk.

And nothing else! No slides, no handout like I was supposed to have, and a lame-ass video as the only product of seven hours of stress and pain and humiliation.

Then I had to get up in the morning after only three hours of sleep, go to school, and do my presentation with just a lousy video and none of the rest of the shit I was supposed to have. And to top it all off, the class ran long so my video was actually watched by people impatient to give to lunch.

So my self-esteem is not great right now. It will recover, especially after I sleep. And I have only one more day of classes then it’s Xmas break, Ross, and fun.

Of course, now I have to write beat sheets for the third and fourth episodes of my show,.

But fuck it. I can do that in my sleep.

One more day folks. One. More. Day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am gonna blog tonight, but only till my download is complete. So odds are, it’s not going to be 1000 words. Because I got work to do.

But a thing happened yesterday that I feel the need to capture in words in this space.

It started with the BCSFA dinner/FRED/BCSFA meeting last night. It was planned for the usual place (ABC County Kitchen in Richmond) at the usual time (6 pm) on the usual day (every other Sunday) and the only difference is that this was Xmas-y.

The trouble started when the time came to leave. I got dressed up in my winter armor (jacket, toque, gloves, scarf from Mom that makes me feel all warm inside) and came out of my room, assuming that my roomies would be ready as well. But they were not. They had, in fact, completely forgotten that this dinner started at 6 pm and hence there had not even started to get ready.

So there I am, impatiently waiting for them to get their shit together, silently fuming.

Then we got to the dinner, and lo and behold, there’s a bunch of people who didn’t bother to RSVP. I made the reservation for 9 people and 12 showed up.

This has been a sticking point for me for a while now. How hard is it to post “I’m coming!” on Facebook? But apparently, some people are positively allergic to commitment and therefore cannot possibly bring themselves to warn people of their arrival.

You’ll know they are showing up when they show up. Period.

And this bugs the hell out of me. I can’t relate to that at all. I have no problem deciding I am going to do something then doing it. I don’t get what the issue is.

So I was kind of snippy to people about not RSVPing for the thing, and if I had been fuming before I was steaming now.

Then it suddenly it hit me : I WAS TURNING INTO MY FATHER.

I was letting my grouchiness cast a shill over what should have been a warm and relaxed event, and all over little things that don’t matter at all in the long run.

So my roomies weren’t ready when I thought they should be ready. So what? All that resulted was in us being *gasp* five minutes late. That’s not much of a tragedy. Certainly nothing worth polluting the Xmas vibe over.

I am a big believer in vibes, especially warm and accepting ones.

And so extra people showed up. The restaurant was perfectly capable of handing the extra people. They just added a table. Simplicity itself.

So what the hell was I so mad about?

This was definitely not the sort of person I want to be. Someone like my Dad, who ruins everything with his glowering rage. Someone people become afraid of because they never know what mood I will be in and therefore which version of me I will be. Someone who gets wound up over trivial things that don’t matter because I interpret them as some kind of personal slight that means people don’t respect me.

God help me, I do not want to be that person.

And I know that part of the problem is that I don’t know how to express anger and frustration in a positive, constructive way. So it builds up in me like volcanic pressure and then it only takes the slightest of things to set the whole thing off.

Because I know, deep down, that my anger last night was not about what it seemed to be about. Those little glitches were merely the pebble that started the avalanche. I have an enormous reservoir of deep, deep rage and pain inside me.

Raw id – steam pressure.

And that is simply unacceptable. My father had to put up with a lot of bullshit at work due to bosses that frankly did not deserve him, and that plus his own issues from a nightmarish childhood turned into the rage monster we loathed and feared as a child.

And I vowed never to be like him. And I will keep that vow even if it kills me.

I want to be the cool guy who rolls with the punches and doesn’t sweat the small stuff because it doesn’t matter in the long run and, as I said to my father many times, a man is only as tall as that which he lets bother him.

I seek greatness of spirit, not pettiness of the soul.

So last night was a crossroads, a chance for me to realized that I was on the wrong path and get back onto the right one.

I am going to be Christmas-y, god dammit, no matter what.

Wish me luck!

Oh, and Happy Holidays to everyone!

So let’s talk about crowdinvesting instead.

Crowdinvesting is a lot like crowdfunding, but instead of getting cool swag or privs or whatever, you get a return on investment (ROI) just like folks used to get from stocks.

Back then, we called them dividends. They consisted of money given to shareholders just for holding shares. It was, believe or not, supposed to be the entire reason to own a stock in the first place. In theory, the whole corporation was devoted to generating profit to give to their shareholders in the form of dividends.

But then the jackals and hyenas of speculation took over and all people cared about was whether they would be able to sell the stock for a higher price at a later date.

The Internet made this effect exponentially worse because now, the stock market rules, and to it, a stock is just a name and a price. This has allowed the parasites who run these companies to turn profits into bonuses and other graft for themselves. Without the pressure from the stockholders to issue dividends, it all goes to line the pockets of the CEO and his cronies, and with that kind of money (and that kind of incentive to screw the workers and everyone else to get every penny they can for themselves), corruption becomes not merely acceptable, and not only rampant, it corrupts the entire system to the point where people can’t even imagine anything different.

And all the time, these mealy mouthed bastards justify every sociopathic atrocity they commit by saying they have a fiduciary responsibility to generate the most profits they possibly can for the shareholders.

All the while knowing that they have compromised the system to such a degree that the shareholders know nothing, get nothing, can do nothing, and don’t even have to be consulted before major decisions like mergers.

Can you believe that stockholders actually got a vote on what corporations did? Companies lived in fear of pissing off the stockholders because those stockholders could hold a meeting and fire the entire board of directors if they had a mind to do it?

These days, the shareholders couldn’t get a stockboy demoted.

So clearly, something new is needed, to get the people back into the corporate world. The old system is too corrupt to save. Too many people with too much money benefit from this very clearly and openly rigged system to change it with anything short of a coup.

The answer, I content,. is crowdinvesting, and it would work like this.

Say a company wants to raise capital. They need 100,000 in order to do a much needed expansion. But they don’t want to issue shares. They want crowdinvesting.

So they would put up the $100K on, what the heck, crowdinvesting.com and people would be able to contribute as much or as little as they wanted, and in return, they would get a piece of the profits of the company in exact proportion to the percent of the investment target they invested.

That sounds complicated but it really isn’t. Say someone invested $10K in our fictional corporation’s funding bid. That’s ten percent of the total offering, so that would entitle them to ten percent of the company’s profits for the term of the offering.

The term would be part of the offering. So our fictional company’s 100K would give the investor their percentage of the profits from their point of investment till, say, two years later. Fair’s fair, after all.

In fact, it might be limited by total payout instead of by time. In that system, once the investor has gotten a certain return on investment  – say double their money back – their investment would expire.

Or triple, or 4,3X, or if it was a more charitable type concern, perhaps people would be willing to invest simply to get their money back, like in micro-lending.

The beauty of this system is that these investments would be non-transferrable. Thus, they would be entirely independent of the stock market and all its slavering speculators. Our 10 percent investor would be the only one who could benefit from that investment. That may seem harsh and it certainly goes against the basic grain of a mercantile consumerist culture where anything you have, you can sell.

But it’s necessary in order to protect this unique and stabilizing form of investment from the whims and follies of the speculator class.

And because it works in a (relatively) simple mathematical formula, absolutely anybody can afford to invest. You could invest a penny if you really felt like it. Payback would be proportional, of course, but for someone with only $20 to invest, having it paid back double or triple or whatever could make a huge difference to their lives.

The best part is that it keeps investors involved with the actual company. How that company does relates directly to their return on investment, and that incentivizes potential investors to look for investment opportunities in solid companies with good business plans and some idea WTF they are doing.

That, in turn, will incentivize companies to be that kind of corporation. That will have a massive stabilizing effect on the economy. The right practices will attract the most money, and the economy as a whole will be far less volatile.

As for the management of the company, they will be free of the corrupting influence of having too much power over too much money. All profits go out the door to the investor as soon as they are made, and the management of the company has little or no say in it.

They are truly just there to run the company. The tail shall no longer wag the dog.

Hmmm. I know I had one more selling point and it was a good one, but I have forgotten it. Oh well. It will come to me eventually.

I know this whole deal is pretty dry and dull to most people. But we cannot, as liberals, afford to leave important decisions in the hands of dry and dull people simply because we are unwilling to deal with dry and dull things.

And honestly, all our liberal goals will be served if we simply reform the way business is done and bring the business world into the world of law and order with the rest of us.

The answers we seek lie in the world of numbers and math, and we betray our ideals if we do not listen to those who speak their language.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am sure I had a head full of deep thoughts earlier today, but they aren’t here now, so you will have to forgive me if tonight’s entry is a tad pedestrian.

Anyhoo, for the record, actual winter is happening here in the GVRD. Snow on the ground, cold outside, road salt on the sidewalks (thank god), the whole schmeer. Things are getting very seasonal^[1] around here. And I am not sure how I feel about it.

Obviously, in an immediate sensory sense, it kind of sucks. My first day out in the cold air was extremely painful because my lungs are not used to it any more and so they complained mightily with every breath.

Plus, my gloves are not warm enough for this shit. So my hands are cold when I am getting to school and back as well.

So if you polled my senses, they would, as one, say FUCK WINTER.

But we are more than our senses, and part of me is kind of digging it, especially now that I have adjusted to it and so it hurts a heck of a lot less.

The cold weather mode of my metabolism is now fully engaged and my body is burning calories for warmth. That’s something that does not happen when the temperature is above freezing. But now that it’s proper cold like a proper winter, I heat myself quite efficiently. And so far, no overheating (SFX : knock on wood).

Last night when I was walking home from the Skytrain, I felt almost cozy. And that opened the door for a big ol’ nostalgia flood.

After all, for around 25 years of my life (including my entire childhood), this kind of winter was the norm for me. I have decades of memories of what I continue to insist is “real winter”, and most of them are from my younger days back when I lived in good ol’ Summerside, Prince Edward Island.

And gosh darn it, I miss that sleepy little burg sometimes. Nostalgia does that to a person, and no season is more nostalgic than the Christmas season. I have tried, for no sane reason, to resist nostalgia’s attempts to make bad times seem good, because as far as I was concerned, that made nostalgia a liar and I wanted to preserve the truth.

But truth and nostalgia don’t have to be at odds with one another. I can preserve the memory of how I felt as a child and all the terrible things that happened to my little sad self in those times without necessarily denying myself the pleasure of remembering them. After all, no time of life is all good or all bad, and it is not like I am in danger of suddenly deciding that I had a magical childhood filled with wonder and joy.

But it’s even bigger deal than that. I honestly think that my bizarre anti-nostalgia stance might well be interfering with my ability to truly put my past behind me. The human mind is not supposed to keep past trauma “new in package” fresh. We are supposed to process these things and get over them.  Interfering with that process by following the intellectual urge to keep one’s knowledge as accurate as possible is inviting disaster.

So much of what is wrong in my head is a result of some decision I made so long ago that I barely even remember it (if that) that presumably seemed like a good idea when I was young and stupid.

I wonder if that is what Asperger’s is like. And if I am on “the spectrum”.

I think I probably am, but at a level far, far below diagnosis. Perhaps all nerds would test positive for it at that kind of level. I have certainly suffered because of my lack of social awareness and inability to read a situation right.

There has to be a way to fix that. To not just teach us socially inept people to be more ept, but to activate the part of the mind that acquires social skills in the first place and feed the right social information into it.

This would probably not be a pleasant process. But if you could pull it off, it could give a whole new lease on life to a lot of people by balancing out their over-intellectual minds.

Wait, what the fuck was I talking about originally? Oh yeah, local conditions.

So my feelings about this spate of actual winter are decidedly mixed. Part of me really, really hopes this shit ends soon and we get a normal (for the GVRD) wet Xmas because that is easier to deal with than snow, ice, and so on.

But a slightly bigger part of me is just fine with this because not only is it seasonally appropriate, and not only is it nostalgic, but to a deep and long forgotten part of me that I thought had died a long time ago, it feels “right”.

This is what December is supposed to be like.  At least until Xmas or New Year’s Day.

Come Boxing Day, this shit can be kicked to the curb with all available force. Xmas is lovely but the rest of winter sucks donkey taint and I can happily do without it.

Especially February. Man, fuck winter in February. Winter can make February seem like the longest month. All the leftover cheer from the Holidays is gone and all you have before you is 28 or 29 days of sheer miserable drudgery. It’s such a drag.

So you hear (read) that, Xmas weather? Dec 26 your ass better be out of here or we will have to take stronger measures.

Jan. 2 at the latest.

And the best of this lousy fucking year : I won’t be spending Xmas alone this year. I have someone who is coming to see me. And I can’t wait.

Those of you who know me personally know who I mean. I haven’t talked about him here because part of me is afraid to wake up from this lovely dream I am having.

But some day soon, I will tell you all about him.

And there is one thing you know for sure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s day was extra long.

That’s because after my 1-4 pm class, my film group held their auditions for the one speaking role in our film, the narrator.

I enjoyed being back in the saddle re : auditioning people. It’s something I find inherently cheerful. All these bright young people doing their best. Plus, I like greeting them with warmth and, god willin’, a little laughter too.

So that was nice. But I would have had a lot more fun if I had been in charge. Our director is, in my opinion, too timid for the job. We barely worked the actors at all. I mean, I wasn’t looking for a marathon or anything, but I would have gotten different takes from the auditioning actors and thrown in some oddball requests to see how good they are at taking direction, as well as how they handle the unexpected.

As is, it was as diffident and timid and lazy as I have come to expect. The voice of the control freak part of my mind gets louder every day. Everything would be so much better if you took over, it says. Since when do you meekly accept the role you are given? Rise above it, take over,  and make it all better!

And one of these days. I might just do it. Make a play for leadership. Maybe sell it as merely taking a few menial tasks off the director’s hands. After all, they are doing so much work. I could help!

But always remember, kids. Real leadership has nothing to do with who is at the top of the org chart and everything to do with who people look to when a decision needs to be made.

My latent Machiavellianism aside, I did talk to the instructor of the course about my concerns today, and that helped me to calm down a little. He told me I should look around for a job nobody is doing, like researching film festivals and other venues for short films.

And lo and behold! That’s the job I ended up with today. Our final assignment for this part of the Production for Writers course is due next Tuesday, and that means I have to come up with five minutes of content about festivals, contests, and so on.

Should not be a problem. I’ll just make a video. I am way better at those than I am with PowerPoint and it gives me a chance to show off my other skills.

Especially that “making goofy ass videos” skill.

And five minutes might seem like a lot of time, but I know from experience that talking takes up way more time than you think it does. It will, most certainly,. be a matter of choosing what goes in, not frantically looking for enough content to fill the time.

It will not be the first thing I work on, though. Under the “due first, done first” rule, tomorrow’s main task will be to come up with a second draft of the outline for the first two episodes of my show.

I have lots of stuff to add and change, and fingers crossed, I have not somehow magically misplaced all the notes I took like last time.

All I had to base my first outline on were the changes I remembered from the workshopping session. And as you all know so well, relying on my memory is an extremely iffy proposition.

So hopefully the second draft will be a whole lot better.

I tried asking my teacher about how to handle the outline for a very dialogue heavy episode. She said to go to what people’s intentions are in the scene.  I do not find this to be helpful advice.

For example, I want to do an episode in the principal’s office as Sam and his best friend Edgar try to talk their way out of trouble with a tough no-nonsense principal.

But here’s what that outline would look like :

INT. PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE – DAY

Sam and his best friend Edgar try to talk their way out of trouble with a tough no-nonsense principal and eventually succeed.

That’s it. That’s the entire outline. For an entire 11.5 minute episode.

The problem is that comedy does not have to be driven by plot. It just has to be funny. And a lot of that humour is going to reside in non-story dialogue.

The plot itself is not going to be all that funny. Especially not in the sort of comedy I write. I don’t really do wacky situations or hilarious coincidences or such.

Nobody would get a truckload of manure dumped on them in a movie I wrote.  Unless it completed a truly epic pun or other kind of joke.

And even then, I would really think it over first. Run it past a few friends.

But no, what I write, especially for this show I am developing, it sitcom humour, and sitcoms are mostly funny dialogue. They sometimes also have wacky situations (that’s the sit in sitcom, after all) but I have never been fond of that kind of thing.

Oh no, someone overheard something and misinterpreted it and now they are defying all reason by concocting a crazy scheme involving several felonies and getting into crazy kind of trouble rather than just talking to the fucking person.

Nuh uh. Not me. Not if I am calling the shots. I would, of course, write reams of that crapola if someone was paying me, but that would never happen with Sam, my baby.

I would never say this in a pitch meeting, but deep down, I would rather make one season of a truly excellent series than umpteen seasons of crap.

I would be just fine with creating that quirky little show with a passionate cult following. Maybe that particular cult would be enough to crowd-fund more episodes. Maybe not.

All I can do as an artist is make good art. The market decides the rests.

Again, I will write whatever I get paid to write.

But my creations will always be awesome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man, afternoons suck sometimes.

Namely, on days when I have nothing in particular to do besides blog. Right now, I don’t have any big projects to work on and so I am kind of at loose ends. And for some reason, that has led me to feeling very blah in the afternoon. both yesterday and today.  I end up all sleepy and overheated and listless and lazy.

Part of that is nudity, admittedly. Yesterday I was hanging about naked because all my clothes were in the wash. Today. it’s because I will just be getting into fresh clothes after I shower before going out later so why waste a change of clothes?

Although considering how craptastic I feel right now, I am considering revising that estimation. I just woke up from a nap and already, I feel like going back to sleep. Pull a siesta and sleep the whole afternoon away. I feel drained and listless and vaguely cranky. That’s no way to pass one’s Sunday.

I mean, sure, technically, it’s a day of rest in the Christian tradition, but there’s rest and then there estivation  (the summer equivalent of hibernation).

And it’s not like it’s a good kind of sleep either. It’s lousy sleepy, all sweaty and smothering and full of too-intense dreaming that sometimes borders on the nightmarish.

Like, I just had a dream where I was exploring a haunted house set up for a movie, but it quickly turned real. So I was really getting into the whole thing, getting scared and tense like I was in real danger while also experiencing it like a horror movie and hoping for some really good scares.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, just scraps. Like moving slowly through dark rooms, looking into mirrors to see if anything cool would happen, and one confusing sequence where some kind of malign spirit that was after me went through this whole elaborate powering up sequence which I suppose was meant to scare me into thinking it would be this powerful demon at the end but nothing it did seem to really change anything.

Perhaps I was really exploring my own subconscious mind. You know, that dark forest of the mind outside the strong, clear light of the reasoning mind that I fear and that, in my more delusional moments, I like to pretend does not exist.

After all, if one defines one’s mind as everything one’s inner eye can see, then there can be nothing outside the light, right?

Especially when you are as “bright” as I am. I can do a lot of things with this powerful mind of mine, and that circle of light illuminates much that is dark to others.

It’s kind of funny. Normal, healthy people of average intelligence see and understand a lot less of the world than I do. And yet they get along in life a lot better than I do. They clearly do not need the sort of understanding I posses, at least in most things.

But I do. I search constantly for understanding because I only feel safe once I have figured things out. Once I have, in a sense, conquered them with my mind. I have so little faith in my ability to handle things in realtime that I can only relax when I can fully understand and predict things.

Maybe not predict them in detail, because that would make life incredibly dull. But I need to understand the range of variables or I get freaked out. That’s not a good way to go through life. Far better to have the totally unpredictable happen and build up your confidence in your ability to deal with it, or at least, to survive it.

But I don’t wanna.

I definitely feel like my horizons need expanding. But I spend so much time merely coping. It’s hard to build up the confidence to face the unknown when you feel like you are just barely holding your guts in most of the time.

I wish I could escape that feeling and feel whole and hearty and ready for the world instead. It happens now and then but not nearly often enough. Most of the time I feel tired and dull. I manage, but I am not exactly attacking life with great zeal.

Plus I think the change in the weather is affecting my mood. Less sunshine means less happiness. Maybe this is the year when I will finally get around to getting full spectrum bulbs for all the lights in my room. Hopefully that will help. Plus I still, in theory, have that light therapy device in my possession…. somewhere.

I definitely feel more cheerful on sunny days. Whether it would qualify as actual Seasonal Affective Disorder is debatable. A lot of people find sunny days cheerful. I would go as far as to say that if you live someplace where sunshine is rare (like most of the Northern Hemisphere), the association between sunshine and happiness is so strong as to be nearly universal. All our visions of paradise or “our happy place” are sunny.

Perhaps it’s cultural, perhaps it’s seasonal, perhaps it’s our bodies getting really excited about producing some freaking vitamin D.

My own vision of basic happiness is, shockingly enough, not much different than other naked beach apes. A sun-dappled meadow, a light breeze, happy animals wandering about, and happy families soaking it all in.

Oddly enough, the beach is only in there at the periphery. I love the beach but I have never imagined it as paradise, possibly because I grew up around beaches and so they are earthy, mundane (but lovely) things to me.

I imagine the visions of peoples that have a surfeit of sunshine are different, and involve a lot of shade and water. Or during the rainy season, their happy place is indoors, warm, and dry, like on Ray Bradbury’s Venus.

But here’s the thing : almost nobody has a vision of paradise where it’s night.

We’re creatures of daylight, after all. Diurnal. And our visions of paradise are really visions of our long lost ideal habitats.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.