I am so fucking angry right now.

I am so angry that I could pull the head off ten chickens and still be mad at the end. I am so mad that I wish I was the Incredible Hulk so I could punch something into the Sun. I am so mad that I could kick a hole in the side of a battleship and not even feel it.

I am telling you, I am quite put out.

To tell you why. I have to start with a funny little thing that happened to me this morning. Namely, that I found my fucking bus pass.

You know, the same bus pass that has been missing for two weeks and whose absence has cost me $8 per school day in transit fees, severely straining both my finances and my nerves the whole time?

Well, it turns out that it was sitting on my floor, right under my computer chair, inches away from me the whole fucking time.

If I had only thought to look there when I first noticed it missing, I would have saved myself all this heartache, stress, guilt, frustration, rage, confusion, and expense.

I am out at least $64 because I am too stupid to be standing up when I am looking around for something that has gone missing. The goddamned fucking piece of shit card was right there all this time.

Oh, but that’s just where this day started.

See, I reported the card missing. The person at the ministry then told me that I had to wait for a letter to arrive, then pay a $10 fee, then I would have my new card.

So when I found my beloved card, I called them up to tell them I found it and that they could cancel the cancellation of it and the sending of a new one as well.

I honestly didn’t expect this to work, but I figured it was worth a shot.

And yup. that was no longer an option. Oh well. But while I was on the line, I asked the person there whether I was doing things right by doing what I was told to do, which is wait for the letter THEN pay the fee.

That had never made sense to me.

And lo and behold, it turns out I could have paid the money immediately and that if I had done so, I would have had my new card way sooner because they don’t send out the fucking card until you pay the fucking fee.

So, not what I was told the first time at all. This whole thing could have been over ages ago and I could have saved a lot of money if the person I talked to  the first time hadn’t completely misinformed me about how this shit works.

Oh, but we are still not done. According to the person on the phone today, now that I have paid the fee (I did it right after I hung up), I will probably get it before the end of December.

Get it? I might get it before the new year, I might not. That’s how long it takes these people to just stick a fucking card in an envelope and mail it to me.

That means there is zero chance I will be able to avoid paying $8 a day for the remaining 7 days of school, bringing the total number of days sans bus pass to 15 and my financial loss to a staggering $120, or around 13 percent of my monthly income, 25 percent of my monthly disposable income. ^[1]

And according to the person I talked to today, there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it. I’m the one living on $975/month due to being disabled. They are the ones with billions of dollars in the budget. They are the ones who fucked up, not me. But I am the one who has to pay for their error.

And all at Christmastime! Merry Christmas, everyone!

I truly feel like the universe owes me that goddamned money. I know I will never get it, but I still feel that way. None of this should have happened.

I mean, I know losing the card in the first place was my fault, but everything after that happened because some cocksucker at the ministry didn’t know WTF he was talking about. This from the the same part of the ministry whose phone line has wait times of over an hour, because apparently the whole section has like three people working there.

Or they are all just a bunch of lazy assholes. Pick your poison.

And I know that I will get over this. That in time, I will shrug this all off and eat the loss and move on with my life having learning a harsh and painful lesson in the casual callous cruelty of bloodless bureaucracy and the total lack of accountability thereof.

But that doesn’t make me any less mad now. I have been fucked over by the system and nobody even gives a shit. I have lost a lot of money because of some dumbfuck dipwad turd gargler at the ministry and there’s not a damned thing I can do to get it back.

For my entire life, I have been at the mercy of other people’s fuckups, and I am sick and tired of it. I deserve better than that,. I don’t deserve to get stepped on my every goddamned idiot who couldn’t find their dick with both hands and a hard-on. I don’t deserve to be treated like I don’t exist or that I don’t matter. I don’t deserve to be smacked around by fate. And I sure as hell don’t deserve to lose my precious cash over a petty bureaucratic error that I just plain can’t afford.

So while there is nothing I can do to get my money back, I can at least express me rage at how I am being treated.

I refuse to suffer in silence any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got called into the office after class today. Hygiene issues. People have complained. I can’t say I am surprised. I knew I had been letting things slip lately.

For whatever reason, my old difficulty with the shower came back. So for a while there, I was only showering once a week. Sundays. Normally I shower a minimum of three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday nights – aka my social nights.

But it got hard to talk myself into the shower for a while there. Very not good. I don’t want some future employment opportunity to pass me by because someone thought, “Michael Bertrand would be perfect for this job, but man, does he smell bad. ”

So I will up my game back to at least presentable levels. I will probably never be the sort of person who showers every morning. I just can’t even. But I can at least get myself back to the level I was at before.

That’s the thing about depression. It can make even the simplest of things much, much harder to do. Like taking a shower.

I suppose I was telling myself that as long as I wore deodorant and my clothes were clean, I could slip by unnoticed. But clearly, that is not enough to get the job done. The body itself gets dirtier and the only cure for that is a shower.

Ironically, if I was going to school in France, this would not even be a thing. Apparently the French only shower for special occasions. And you can really tell.

I could not adapt to that. Not at my age. I get the feeling that if I lived in France, I would have to live someplace way out of the way, where the trains are never crowded and there is lots of fresh air to be had at all times.

But lest we in North America get to feeling all high and mighty about not being like the smelly French, we should remind ourselves that by Dutch or Japanese standards, we’re all a bunch of filthy pigs.

Anyhow, the hygiene thing will be taken care of. The small talk before the intervention was more interesting, because I got to tell the head of the Writing Department, Michael Baser, about the problems I am having in my film group.

I told him how one person is doing all the jobs, we’re not hiring anyone, and how I didn’t feel like I was learning anything from the experience. He said he would talk to the teacher of the class about it. So that will presumably start something happening.

Not the way I would have preferred to handle the situation. I was working up the nerve to post something about it on Facebook. Just lay it all on the line : how I’m not happy with my limited role, how I didn’t feel like people were taking things seriously, about how I don’t feel like I am learning anything if we’re not casting or hiring or any of that.

If things go the way they are going now, I will end the class knowing no more than I knew going in about how to do a short film. And I want to make those so I can showcase my writing talent and show TV people what I can do.

One nap later…

However, because I did end up telling Baser all about my issues, that puts me in the awkward position of waiting for the hammer to drop on my group when I am the one who set it in motion in the first place.

Not that I think any punishment will happen. VFS doesn’t operate like that unless it has to. Presumably Baser will talk to Bob Woolsey, the instructor of my Production for Writers course, and Bob will talk to us, and hopefully things will be rejiggered so that we all get something to do and we’re actually doing things like hiring and managing and such.

If not, I may have accidentally screwed our group dynamic for good. Then again, we don’t have much of a group dynamic now anyhow. Part of what convinced me that I had to do something about the situation instead of suffering in silence is that I don’t think any of the other members of the group are super happy either. Our last meeting had all the joie de vie of a depression support group. I think we have stumbled into this situation with very good intentions and a plan that sounds good on paper, but that did not take into account things like morale, motivation, and most of all, that we are all supposed to be learning from the experience, and we aren’t learning anything.

It would be nice if we ended up hiring a few pros. I would feel a lot better if we had someone with a lot of experience on the team. Hiring a good director would be a great start, because honestly, this group needs an executive and yet none of us have any sort of standing to take over.

Theoretically, the person who wrote the script is in charge, and that’s the same person who wants to be the director, editor, sound person, lighting person, and damn near everything else. Plus we’ll be using her apartment.

But that person does not seem to me to be the right fit for director. The project needs someone to organize things, assign tasks, and most importantly of all, keep people fired up and excited about the project.

Instead, we have a diffident director with extremely low affect and who wants to do everything themselves, leaving little for the rest of us.

I would do the job myself if I thought I could get them to follow me. I would love to take on that role. I guess I would be the producer in that case. It was what I had planned for myself before reality set in.

I really feel like I was born to organize and lead.

I just lack the self-confidence to believe anyone would follow.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.