Today was a pleasant day. There was a partial break in the real winter weather we’ve been having lately… yes, it’s back. It was sunny and warm in the afternoon. Some of the snow was melting. If this was back home on Prince Edward Island, it would seem like a perfectly ordinary day in early spring.

And it would be occurring in late March at the earliest.

Class was fine. Or at leas, it would have been if I hadn’t been so sleepy the whole time. This keeps happening. It is a real problem because it means I spend the entire class stressed out by struggling to stay awake and pay attention.

In fact I actually fell asleep in class yesterday. A first.

Till now, I have simply said it was from getting too little sleep, which is quite often the case with me. I go to bed at 2 am and wakes up at 7 am, and that’s only five hours of sleep. That is not enough for a healthy human being. I need more.

But I am loathe to stop hanging out with Joe watching Colbert and Daily Show after midnight. I would sleep better, but I would miss the pleasant socialization with my buddy Joe, and that seems like a net loss to me.

Or, at best, breaking even.

Without that time with Joe, my days would be very lonely, and I know for a fact that would be very bad for me. I need a certain amount of socialization and if I don’t get it, I fall apart and end up at the bottom of a very dark well.

In other words, I go crazy,

So that is one explanation for why I so often have to struggle to make it through my morning classes. Two others occurred to me today :

1. It has something to do with how my school mornings involve the stress and strain of getting to school followed by a lot of sitting still and listening, and
2. Maybe it’s my sleeping pills

And it’s that second theory that is troubling me.

This theory hadn’t occurred to me before now because it is a bit counterintuitive. After all, I get up in the morning and get my ass to school. It’s not easy but it’s not abnormally hard either. My crossword puzzle addiction keeps my mind active on the Skytrain, as well as keeping me from feeling claustrophobic during rush hour.

The rest of the trip, I’m walking, and it’s hard to fall asleep doing that.

Not impossible, but… tricky.

So if I can do all that, how can I blame my sleepiness on the pills? But actually, it makes sense in light of theory #1. Getting to school keeps me from feeling it, but once I am in class, the pills reassert themselves.

If that truly is the culprit, then I am really in a pickle, because I am not taking sleeping pills for fun. I need them. Before Doc Costin put me on those pills, I couldn’t stay asleep for more than 2 hours at a time. That was very bad for my mood. The pills let me get at least five hours and sometimes something close seven or eight (on days off).

So if the pills are the problem then the alternative, skipping the pills, is not a whole lot better. So it’s a tough choice. One way, I am sleepy and stressed in class, and the other, I get lousy sleep and potentially end up even worse.

Still, I want to explore this theory, so tonight, I am not going to take my sleeping pills and see what happens then. I might end up with insomnia. If so, I will have to weigh whether I should take them in order to at least get a little sleep.

The best case scenario is that I end up getting at least some sleep, and I feel way more alert and awake in class. That would seem like a miracle to me around now. It would improve the quality of my life drastically.

And honestly, I could adjust to sleeping mostly in the evenings, between 7 and midnight. That would still be five hours.

I guess I would do my homework after Joe goes to bed. Hmmm. This plan needs work.

Right now, I just want to hibernate. Sleep till spring, or at least, until I am absolutely, positively done. Need for sleep gully satiated. All napped out.

As it stands, I am probably going to take a nap after I am done blogging for the night. I don’t want to do it. I’d rather play video games for a while then do my homework for tomorrow. I have two sets of pages from TV Pilots to read and generate notes for.

But I will nap because I have no choice. There’s no point in trying to stay awake when you are too tired and incoherent to do anything. Best to rest up and hope to wake refreshed.

It could happen.

I am definitely tired of being tired and sick of being sick. Also, tired of being sick and sick of being tired. And sick and tired in general.

But the thing is, there have been times when I was more awake and alert and free of the chilling numbing fog inside, and on a deep level I rejected it because everything was too intense. I couldn’t take being that awake and alive. I have spent so long as a member of the living dead that being alive scares me.

Everything gets so loud!

So I retreat into myself once more in order to restore “normal” stimulus levels. It takes a long time for me to overcome that and truly try to climb out of my dank dark hole again so I can live in the light for a change.

Maybe the secret is to take the trip slowly. Restrain my urge to throw off my shackles and soar in favour of progress I can keep.

Or maybe I just need to get the fuck over myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s the day I had two of the same class in a row to make up for the fact that the instructor was sick last week.

It was stupid, but not unpleasant. It gave the day a feeling of continuity. So even though we spent the whole day talking about feature films (even though 2/3 of us are in the TV stream), I am not really complaining.

We even got to watch a movie that our instructor produced. The movie is called Do Something With Your Life and it’s about a guy in his mid twenties reaching the “what am I doing with my life?” stage that is common these days.

It even has a name : the quarter life crisis. It happens when a young person wakes up from their post-college life of minimum wage jobs, weed, video games, and hooking up and suddenly realizes they have a life and a future and dreams and they are not doing anything to help any of them.

So it’s kind of a spiritual transition between hedonism and something more purposeful. It’s the first true blooming of the desire for context in one’s life. This is the same desire that makes people dig into their family trees or explore the culture they come from.

Or in my case, both.

It was a pretty decent flick. It’s more or less a romantic comedy but doesn’t follow the recipe precisely. It’s got some genuinely funny bits and it explores its themes quite while. The acting is quite good and it’s a solid script. The ending kind of sucks from the point of view of story structure, but at least it’s not cliche.

The really impressive part is that despite looking almost as good as a Hollywood movie, the whole thing was made for around $15,000.

I think the lack of budget actually helped it. Almost everything is shot on location in real people’s houses, yards, and workplaces, and it gives the whole thing a very “real” feel. Everything is easily recognizable and familiar. You’ve been to these houses, you’ve met these people, you’ve worked these crappy jobs.

It honestly makes me want to explore this kind of cinema verite approach myself. It reminded me of Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless Mind, which stands in my (not so spotless) mind as the most real feeling movie I have ever seen.

It might seem a trifle indulgent for the instructor to show one of his own movies in class, but it was actually quite awesome because it meant that we got to watch a movie then ask questions of one of the main people behind it. That’s an invaluable resource for us entertainment biz wannabes.

But the instructor let something slip that really shocked me and struck me as just plain wrong. Apparently, he and two other instructors are planning on taking nearly a month off to go on vacation together, and my instructor plans to make up for the class time he will be missing by having four of the same class in the same week. 

That’s totally unacceptable. It shows a gobsmacking disrespect for the students and really strikes me as the sort of thing that can only happen when institutional decadence has gotten  to the point where people feel free to do whatever they can get away with.

Clearly, someone is not doing such a great job of instilling dedication and discipline in the staff. Everyone knows that, in strictly self-oriented terms, nothing bad will happen to them if they phone it in or pull stunts like this vacation clusterfuck. The place will still be there, the money will continue to roll in at a staggering rate, the students will be forced to accept whatever they are given, and everything will be sunshine and lollipops… for them.

Meanwhile, us students feel kind of left out of the equation and taken for granted. It makes me feel like VFS is coasting on its reputation as a top tier school and that the teachers tell themselves “Well, what the kids really want is the diploma and the career opportunities, and they will still get those, so who cares what they are actually taught?”.

I probably shouldn’t be talking about this. It could conceivably come back to bite me on the ass some day. But I had to say something about it on the record. I just can’t keep quiet about this. It’s just plain wrong.

One of the other people taking this trip is the head of the department I am in. I get the feeling he doesn’t take his job very seriously. And when the leader doesn’t take things seriously, neither will those he leads. The rot starts from the top.

I’m not saying I am getting a terrible education. It’s actually quite good. I learn a lot at school. I feel like my evolution as a writer is progressing at light speed compared to what I could accomplish on my own. And I am not saying my instructors are incompetent. They are doing a fine job.

It’s more about what message they are sending out when they treat things so lightly. It’s also a feeling I get that morale is pretty low in my department. It’s hard for people to find purpose in their work when they are led by someone who gives off the impression that he really doesn’t give a shit.

So my feeling is that the instructors feel alienated from the institution of VFS, and like they are on their own as far as VFS is concerned. People need leaders who make them feel like they are part of something greater than themselves, and who is willing to enforce the rules in order to make people feel like there is some kind of justice and structure to their lives. When that is not there, things fall apart.

Maybe I am totally wrong. This could just be my issues doing the talking. I certainly have strong feelings about being treated like an afterthought.

And hey, no matter what, I will graduate, get my degree, and hopefully a career in the biz.

And I guess that’s all that matters. Right?

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

It’s so hard to express your emotions sometimes.

And from a certain (admittedly naive) point of view, it can seem downright crazy. Why is it so hard to do? You’d think it would be as simple as deciding to do it. And sometimes it is that simple…. but simple isn’t the same as easy.

It’s both tragic and comic to think that there’s all these people in the world, myself strenuously included, walking around in pain and misery simply because they can’t get their emotions out. It’s like the whole world needs an enema.

Especially, I suspect, us Northern European types.

Of course, it’s not as simple as merely deciding to do it. And thank goodness for that. What we suppress by throwing that emotional cutoff switch becomes a part of us, and keeping those emotions suppressed becomes a major part of how we deal with the world.

To simply yank out these building blocks of the mind without thought as to consequence would be to yank a random card out of a house of cards. Odds are, the whole thing is going to come tumbling down, and that is catastrophic to the mind.

That’s what we mean when we say someone had an emotional breakdown. Their psyche simply could not take the strain any more. Despite poetic BS about the infinite vistas of the human mind, our mental resources are just as finite as everything else, and if you have a psyche that can’t vent the pressure in the system caused by a psyche at war with itself, sooner or later, you will pay the price.

I’ve never had an emotional breakdown myself. Or maybe I did, but it just didn’t matter because I was doing nothing with my life as well as going nowhere, so whatever emotional breakdowns I had were private and not all that different from any other day dealing with major depression and anxiety.

But I have never had the classic sort of nervous collapse you see in the media. And honestly, I kind of wish I had, It might actually have been good for me in the long run. Sure, it might have meant some time in an institution, but at least all my repressed emotion would be dumped into my psyche and I would be forced to deal with them.

It would be like rebooting your computer to get rid of a lot of background processes that are slowing your computer down so much that the most basic functions are breaking down. It wouldn’t cure the basic problems that led to the computer getting to such a state, but it would make it a whole lot easier to find them and fix them.

But no. Instead, I just keep going. No matter what.

Because I have no choice. I know that if I fall, there’s nobody to catch me. That has been true for my entire life, or at least, my life after my first day of school. Nobody was watching out for me, nobody was trying to keep me from getting hurt, nobody was there for me if I was sad, nobody was listening to me, and nobody was trying to guide me through life.

And no matter how hard I cried, nobody came.

I still can’t really wrap my mind around the consequences of growing up so completely alone. It’s too wrong to comprehend. And its wrongness is compounded by the fact that this neglect was invisible. I showed no outward signs of illness. At least, none that were severe enough to overcome people’s desperate need to make me go away.

I’m sure at least some of my childhood teachers must have had some idea that there was something wrong with me. That’s why I got a certain degree of official attention in my first three years of school. I was an unusual case, mentally gifted yet far far behind my peers in terms of coordination, fine muscle control, and balance.

But eventually, they stopped caring. I was too hard for them to deal with. So I was left all alone in a world full of people to whom I simply did not matter enough for them to pay attention to me at all.

Sometimes I think that the 1970’s were a terrible time to be a kid.

So you can see (he says, lamely trying to get back on topic), I have a lot of damage that I would love to be able to express. I had a terrible childhood for preventable reasons. That’s trauma heaped upon trauma. It is a terrible way to grow up.

Especially when you are too young and fragile to realize how wrong it all is. I spent a lot of my childhood in a state of utter submission. I was completely powerless and grateful for anything I got, and that was about it.

I knew, on some level, that my life wasn’t like the lives of the other kids in my class. Or like the lives of the people on TV who were my substitute family. But I was too timid to even imagine that there was a way to change that. That it was possible to make my life more like theirs.

I didn’t even grasp that complaining was an option. That’s how emotionally neutered I was. How profound a lack of agency I felt.

When I look back on it, it all seems so…. cold.  I suppose that is what you get when you end up dealing with the world almost entirely through your intellect. I feel like I was deep frozen by the kind of cold you get in interstellar space. Frozen so perfectly that I looked entirely lifelike from the outside, at least at a glance.

And I didn’t get much more than glances.

I was one messed up little kid. I really could have used someone who listened and cared and looked out for me.

But eventually, not even my mother wanted to listen to me any more.

Can you imagine what that does to a kid?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let me repeat that : reality does not make sense.

But we act like it does.

Maybe he have no choice. I have spoken before about how the human must always assume that it has enough information to make a decision because decisions have to be made if we are to survive. It’s part of the price we pay for having eaten the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and become sentient.

Animal do not have to make a lot of decisions. They just follow instinct.

Where this need to assume we have sufficient knowledge falls down, though, is when it comes into conflict with reason and science.

And I am not speaking of the obvious conflicts like the one between science and religious dogma, or science and entrenched prejudice. Those are a fish of an entirely different barrel and involve a different set of variable.

What I am talking about is how reason and science themselves tend to assume they know everything and how easily that turns reason on its head and becomes merely another set of prejudices perpetrated by people who say they “know enough”.

It was a Heinlein story that put me on to this subject. It’s a story called “Life-Line”, and it tells the tell of a brilliant scientist named Pinero who invents a machine that can measure how long a person’s life line – the line their life makes through time – and thus predict the exact moment of their death.

You can imagine the Twilight Zone possibilities that unleashes.

The story opens with Pinero trying to convince an august assembly of respected scientists that his invention works, and of course, they refuse to even listen to him because, as one of them says of Pinero;s work, “even a schoolboy can see that these ideas are preposterous to the point of being laughable”.

Or something like that.

And that, plus a few other things, got me thinking about that particular form of human stupidity. In the story, these supposed men of science have substituted their prejudiced sense of the absurd for actual rational thought, and enjoy a round of a very ugly and extremely unscientific round of self-congratulation at Pinero’s expense.

These men^[1] were not in any sense thinking logically or rationally. A sense of the absurd is not a rational thought process. Practically every major invention or discovery was thought ludicrous by the establishment at the beginning.

Leading scientists mocked the idea of heavier than air flying machines right up until the Wright brothers made it work. Quantum physics was a subject derided by no less a light than Einstein, even though the mathematics clearly proved them true. People laughed at the idea that you could cure mental illness just by talking to them until the number of patients cured by Freud and his disciples grew too large to ignore.

I mean, how would this “talking cure” even work? Do the words Freud speaks somehow contain vibrations that cure the patient’s brain like a magic spell? Ridiculous.

But science and reason are not concerned with absurdity because it has no direct bearing on truth. All that matters is evidence, whether you’re a nuclear physicist, a historical scholar, or the world’s foremost expert on North Korean beer. The scientific method is simple and clear and at no point does it say “you can skip all of this if the theory being tested makes you laugh”.

Like my hero, Gus Grissom from the show CSI, says, “people lie but the evidence never does”. There is no rationally acceptable reason to a priori reject any postulate, no matter how absurd it seems, without rationally examining it.

Even something very close to rationality, namely testing to see if the postulate conflicts with what we already know, cannot be relied upon. What we already know might be wrong.  The only truly rational method is to test the theory.

There are practical limitations to how many theories we can hope to test, and by that measure we can declare some possibilities to be too remote to be worth spending money on testing, but that is a practical concern, not a rational one. And in a world where doing science at home has never been easier (what with all the cool, consumer-level sensors and such), that barrier is lowering day by day.

The closest non-reasoning method to actual reason is whether or not something “makes sense” to us. That does a very good impression of being actual thinking, but it is nevertheless irrational. Reality is not confined by what makes sense to humans, let alone what makes sense to individual humans. There is actually no correlation between what makes sense to us and what is true. There is no guarantee that we will never discover things that make no sense to us at all and yet are demonstrably true.

Take my favorite example, the fact that we now know that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. It’s expanding faster that it was when we first starting measuring these sorts of things and nobody has the slightest idea why.

And that plainly makes no sense according to what we already know. On that basis alone, I assume a lot of people rejected the evidence when it first came out. Some probably still do. It flies in the face of a century of astrophysics. Big Bang? Bangs don’t accelerate.

It makes no sense, and yet it’s demonstrably true. And when that happens, the only intellectually honest thing to do is change your ideas. You thought some things that turn out not to be true, and that means that you must stop believing them no matter whether you feel like it (or up to it) or not.

And if you refuse to do so, you are thereby excusing yourself from rational discourse and the company of adults.

Go play with the other infants at the kiddie table!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First of all, sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday about not being able to blog because homework was kicking my ass for another night.

And now, I have to apologize again, because I can’t blog tonight either.

But I will be back tomorrow, I promise!