Well I fucked up again.

I knew I had Episode 2 class on Friday. But once more forgot that things are due two days before class, and so I wasted a lot of time working on my assignment for Adaptation class last night when I should have been working on the next version of my Episodes 3 and 4.

So that’s what I will be doing tonight. So fair warning, this is likely to be an underweight blog entry because I only have my lunch hour to work on it and I will be too busy to blog when I get home.

I wish I could say that I will improve given time on the whole remembering thing, but seeing as there are only 8 class days left, I am pretty sure I missed the boat on that.

Oh well. Perhaps my teachers will recommend me anyhow. Even though I have been very unreliable in my work.

I loathe unreliable people and I hate having that word attached to me, but the shoe fits. I am always handing things in late and occasionally forgetting them entirely, and that makes me pretty unreliable in the world of entertainment.

I can only hope that the quality of my writing and a very strong work ethic will make me worth it to potential employers.

The realization that I have a strong work ethic is quite recent. It doesn’t fit with my laissez faire self image.

But to me, deadlines are sacred and I love to be hard at work. The times recently when I have been writing have been amazing. It engages my mind way better than any video game I have ever played. For the time I am writing, I am fully absorbed in what I am doing and that means there is no brain CPU left over for anxiety, depression, or any other bullshit that is clogging up my brain.

When I am writing, I am safe. And you have no idea how much that means to me.

I can argue my weak case for my unreliability not being a work issue. After all, in a writer’s room, I won’t be required to keep six different courses’ worth of work clear in my head. Deadlines will be deadlines, and it won’t be entirely up to me when shit gets done.

But none of that changes the bad impression I have made on my teachers. I hope I can get a recommendation from somebody.

Rick seems to like me. And Baser knows Norman Lear. That could open doors

Because to me, sitcom is a second language. I could totally write for a Norman Lear style sitcom. It would practically be a homecoming to me.

Which is sad. But whatever.

On Monday, we went through my scene in Writer’s room, and it was rough. As a group, we removed a ton of content because it wasn’t necessary, and so I saw a lot of jokes everyone said were funny bite the dust.

My babies! Mama still loves you.

The problem is that when everyone’s scenes were stitched together,  the resulting Frankenscript was twenty pages too long. That has forced us to go on a serious hunt for shit that doesn’t belong.

Well I have to print some shit and go. At least I got to 500 words.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

Been feeling quite sick today. I had to skip my morning class because of it. My illness’ primary symptom is a deep and heavy feeling of malaise. I just plain feel unwell. And it has me kind of worried.

I spent a lot of this morning feeling like death insufficiently warmed over, or maybe death where something went horribly wrong with the warming process and now you’re stuck up an elephant’s asshole and for some reason you can only express yourself via tin whistle.

Can you tell I’m reading Pratchett?

But the thing is, I have had these symptoms before.And it’s always ended the same way : at some point, the whole thing lifts and suddenly I feel fine.

As of this moment, I am still waiting on that. Granted, I felt much better this morning after I finally managed to get to the kitchen and make (and eat) some lunch. There’s nothing so bad that low blood sugar can’t make worse, after all.

But I still felt pretty crappy. Luckily, I was able to marshal my inner resources and get some work done in the afternoon, namely generating notes for tomorrow’s class.

Pilot 3 class, to be specific.

There has been some movement on the issue of the kind of notes I write. My language and logic corrections. For a while, I felt bad because my notes were about such small details and everyone else talked of things that are far more substantial.

But then I realized that the fact that nobody else gave notes like mine means I had a niche. I was That Guy, the one who handles the little details. That’s my job.

That made me feel better, but I still wondered if I was doing any good or whether people rolled their eyes at the minutiae of it all and tossed my notes into their circular file.

But two things have happened to make me feel better about that :

First, Kat, one of my instructors,  remarked approvingly about how good I am at catching the fine details. That made me feel a lot better about the whole deal.

Then a classmate, Aash, told me how much he enjoyed my notes.

So that’s that, I am not just some weird guy obsessed with trivial issues of logic and language. I’m appreciated. It’s a good feeling.

It’s made me start to wonder if this capacity of mine is marketable. It seems like it would be. I could help people polish up their scripts, or polish them up myself. After I was done with their script it would flow more smoothly, the language would be stronger and clearer, and a lot of redundant (or even terrible) content would have been trimmed out.

Surely that’s worth $50 to somebody. And I need the money for things like a decent set of clothes, content entry fees, secret lists of producer’s home numbers, and the like.

I have a career to launch, after all.

I find it very odd to be in the position of being the person who focuses on the little things in something. I think of myself as a big picture kind of person and quite frankly I am often annoyed with people who obsess over small details when there are larger issues at hand.

It all boils down to priorities, I suppose. I have no issue with detail oriented people using their skills to make things better. In fact, I love that kind of thing precisely because it is outside my wheelhouse and therefore seems just a little bit like magic to me.

But if they obsess over tiny details when they should be paying attention to the big picture, I get angry. I have nightmares about someone obsessing over the graphic design of the safety posters while the building is burning down around them.

Pull your head out of your ass and help me put out the fire.

And that is usually where my temperament stands. But I have always had an inkling that language would be the one area in my life where that did not apply.

Because I feel language, All those little errors I point out in my notes are things I found painful. This is such a strong aspect of me that the emotional reaction happens immediately and all the intellectual mind does is figure out what is bugging me.

This has led me to the conclusion that I would be one hell of a good head writer. Or something like that. Someone in the writing food chain that has the authority to make writers go back and fix their mistakes.

Or I could fix them myself. But I doubt a lot of writers would go for that.

I would have to live with the fact that I would not be very popular, though. People tend not to like the guy who keeps telling them :”WRONG! Do it again. ”

In fact, if I was in their shoes, I would resent me too. But I would take the instructions to heart and learn to do things the way this ogre of a gatekeeper wants them done.

And to be honest, it would probably make me a better writer.

And being that fine polishing guy would be a better starting job for me than script coordinator. I could be a script coordinator but I would not enjoy it.

Come to think of it, I would be a bit of a prick there too because I would make everybody sign for their bloody scripts so that I knew who was on what skit.

The part of the job I would really hate, though, would be to be the person in the writer’s rooms who types up what the writers decide should be in the the script and makes the changes they want to the script later, too.

I couldn’t do it. I know this because that’s what my instructor for Writer’s Room,. Jenny, has been doing for us, and while I find it absolutely magical to be able to just come up with ideas and have someone else write it down, I would not be cut out to be that person.

Why? Because it involves a lot of people giving you suggestions (or orders) at the same time,. and in situations like that, I just plain shut down until clarity appears.

That was true back when I was the youngest of four kids and would have five people telling me what to do at the same time, and it’s still true today.

One time it made me so frustrated that I shouted “ELECT. A SPOKESMAN. ”

Imagine that coming from a little kid.

Hmm, I should use that in Sam!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

I’ve been indulging my lazy side today. But I earned it yesterday. Yesterday, I did almost all of the work for my Career Launch class.

Well, the first drafts, anyhow. Technically, none of it is due till the last day of class, BUT if it is handed in early, the prof will give me feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and it might be presented to the class for feedback too.

And that’s awesome, because I want these things to be as good as possible. These are the things I will use to represent myself in the world of entertainment employment, and I want to put my best foot forward.

I did four things :

1. A query letter. That’s the sort of thing you send to a company giving them the basic idea of what you are selling and asking them if they want to see more. Mine is a bit too long, but quite charming, I think. If they ask to see more, you send them a…
2. One-sheet.  Like the name implies, this is a quick one-page document that gives more of the details of who you are, what the project is all about, etc. Mine turned out to be a lot shorter than I thought it would. A little white space at the bottom of the page is not a serious crime, but I get the feeling I was a victim of how good I am getting at expressing myself succinctly. Still not perfect at it, by any stretch, but I am much improved relative to this time last year.
3. My resume. Ah, the dreaded resume. Nobody really likes writing theirs, but people like me with no job experience in this millennium really loathe it. I managed to make it fun by injecting my particular brand of wacky humour into it, and I partially covered my lack of job experience  by listing all my independent creative works, like my million word year, hundreds of videos, dozens of short musical compositions, four novels, forty short stories,and of course, this blog where I have written a thousand words a day since 2011. But I had the most fun writing…
4. My bio. I let my nutty sense of humour run wild on this thing,.Technically, your bio is supposed to be strictly for something to put on the show business equivalent of the inside front cover of a book. But my instructors have said that this is really what you use to sell yourself as a writer, and give potential employers a sense of who you are. Well, my bio gives them a heapin’ helping of that all right!

Here’s the bio. I am both proud and a little ashamed of it.

The Legend of Michael Bertrand

“A+++. Excellent student. Would teach again. “

Mrs. McLeod, six grade teacher

Wonderful and Perceptive Human Being

“He and I had the same business agreement for years. And I can say, without a doubt, that there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t get my newspaper. “

Mr Peter Hogg, newspaper recipient

Fine and Upstanding Pillar of the Community

“You mean the fat kid?”

Mister Anderson, worst gym teacher on the planet

Owner and Operator of a stupid, stupid face

These are some of the things that critics worldwide are saying about future superstar and all around swell kinda guy, Michael Bertrand. But do any of us really know him? What is going on inside that fantastic mind of his? What powerful forces intermingle to create such powerful prose? And does he have a heterosexual brother?

Yes. Yes he does. Text him at (555) 555-FAKE and he’ll hook you up.

Michael was born, at a very early age, in the tiny Maritime fishing town of Summerside amidst the green rolling hills of Prince Edward Island, in the great nation of Canada, He likes to say he wasn’t born in the middle of nowhere, but rather in the place people who did live in the middle of nowhere meant when they said they were going into town.

He says a lot of things like that. You get used to it.

He was the youngest of four children, and that meant nobody cared what he did. That was both the best and the worst thing about it.

At school, he was a gifted student who did his school work with contemptuous ease and passed every test without ever studying.

This might have contributed to the constant bullying.

He went to college at the University of Prince Edward Island, which has the dubious distinction of being consistently voted the second worst college in Canada. (Suck it, Memorial!)

He excelled there as well, and would have graduated with a degree in Psychology from there had his parents not withdrawn funding half way through so they could retire early.

From there, he become a wanderer of the wilds of the World Wide Web, and beheld many a majestic and mysterious site. Long did he roam, having grand adventures and carefully gathering knowledge.

In other words, he surfed the Web and played video games.

But soon he grew bored of the vagabond’s road, and after a brief stint in traditional education, was accepted into the Writing for Film and Television program at the prestigious Vancouver Film School. He worked hard, wrote many things, and now, he is a proud graduate of that program.

And now he stands, ink still wet on his diploma, ready to join your writer’s room and use his talents to make your television show even better,.

Almost brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

It’s too long…. I will have to trim it by a hundred words or so. And it might just be that my prof will tell me I need to tone it way the fuck down. Which would suck, because what is in that bio is me all the way, or at least, my comedy writer side. I showed off my high-flying Douglas Adams level comedy writing abilities as well as showcased my big big personality and enthusiastic style.

And I definitely think it will quite distinctly different from all the other bios the gatekeepers read. They might find it annoying as fuck and want nothing to do with me ever again, but they will also remember it, and that’s what this game is all about.

It all comes down to this : you want to be someone they know, because when choosing between someone they know and someone they don’t, they will go with the known quantity nearly every single time.

The goal, then, is to make a distinct impression in their minds. It should be a positive impression, naturally, but that’s slightly less important. What you really want to do is turn yourself into a known quantity. If that known quantity is a little obnoxious, that is still better than being a pleasant nonentity.

That’s why persistence is so important. They might not remember your name the first time after your query them for the first time, but when you keep querying them every two weeks, you will both show your commitment and eagerness to work there, and push your name a little further each time to crossing the consciousness barrier, and if you make it through, they will be aware of you.

Plus you advance your cause in their minds towards the ultimate goal – to make it easier to simply give you what you want.

All the while, of course, you are pleasant and warm and nice. No going psycho and ranting to the wonderful people who can make your dreams come true about how they will rue the day they dared rejecting you when you become the next Matt Groening or whatever.

No going supervillain on them, basically.

And no treacly sucking up, either. People hate that. It makes them lose all respect for you and that makes you repulsive to them. Which is the opposite of what you want.

Just persistent, pleasant, polite nudges now and then. My father showed me the power of being polite but firm. It can move mountains.

So Phase Two of my career plan will center on getting my name out there. I’m going to come up with a system for tracking what places I have queried when (probably involving a calendar program) and I will stick with it no matter what.

The only thing that will stop the process is success. When I get a job, I will stop.

Other than that, I am in it for the long haul. I know this process will take a long time, and I am ready for it.

I am going to get a job in a writer’s room even if I have to charm the whole world in order to do it, god dammit.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow, homework permitting.

a simple question : why do I keep eating sugary baked goods when I know they are extremely bad for me?

And the simple answer is hardly noble or intelligent : I do it because it makes me happy. It is a long term sacrifice of health for short time feeling of wellbeing and happiness.

That’s not the kind of choice I usually make. I am a future-oriented person  who is always thinking about what is best for the long term, and in normal circumstances, I would be the last person in the world to be so shortsighted.

And I tend to have a bit of contempt for those who are, quite frankly.

Now the traditional explanation promulgated be Western culture is that I am obviously a weak-willed person who deserves to get sick and die because I could not control myself well enough to stay away from the sugar.

That, as patient readers will know, is utter bullshit.

Willpower is a myth. All that matters is reward and motivation. You either have it good enough mood-wise that a lack of pleasure/reward in one area will not be a big deal because you have enough other sources of pleasure/reward to compensate for the loss, or you don’t.

That’s why depressive have addictions. The disease, by damping down all of your emotional responses, suppresses most reward signals, leaving the depressive to subsist in a very unrewarding life.

And human beings can’t live like that. For humans, please/reward is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. We have an inner sense of wellbeing that dictates everything we do^[1].

If it is above a certain level, we are happy and feel good about ourselves. In the deep social programming of our minds, this high level of reward means we have the approval of our tribe and are doing right by it, and that makes us feel good and shores up our self-worth. on a very critical level.

But if it goes below that level. we begin to feel bad. We are disfavored by our tribe or group and we will feel that way until we have set things right. Both our sense of well-being and our self-worth are at stake. We are motivated to change.

But when it goes down to a critically low level, the whole machine begins to break down. This leads to either panic (anxiety) or despair (depression). The individual is constantly in a state of stress because every fiber of their being is screaming out in need of some kind of reward. to bring the system into balance and until it is, the person is not in control of their actions and our sense of individual responsibility begins to break down and does  not fully take into consideration all the relevant factors of the situation.

All of our civilized behaviour is contingent on getting our basic needs met, and our need for pleasure/reward is the most basic need of all, the one that controls the rest.

The further away from that sense of well being we get, the more our instincts override our rational minds and take control. Our actions, therefore, do not fit the usual sense of individual responsibility because the worse it gets, the less our civilized mind is making the choices and the more we are dictated to by our instincts.

That;s why the honest man steals a loaf of bread if he is starving. And why he doesn’t remember deciding to do it. The truth is that he didn’t decide to do it. Instinct took control and it drove him to do it. The decision making part of his mind was cut out of the loop by instincts aroused to the point where they simply take over.

I suspect something similar happens in some cases of infidelity. Two people’s sexual needs are so strong from being unmet that they literally never decide to cheat. Instinct takes over and doesn’t give control back to the conscious mind until the sex is done and both people’s sexual needs meter is back up to a healthier level.

And when they are called on it, they are telling the truth when they say they never decided to do it, it just sort of…. happened.

My situation is not quite so desperate, but the same principle applies.; My depression blocks the pkeasure/reward I should be getting from life and my sense of wellbeing falls down to dangerous levels and it takes a super strong pleasure/reward in order to get it back up to healthy levels.

Hence the sugary food. Sure, it’s terrible for me, but that doesn’t matter because my immediate need for strong pleasure/reward drives me to seek high-reward activities and for me, that tends to come across via food.

Add in the fact that buying a sugary dessert makes me feel good when I do it, then makes me feel good because I have something to look forward to, then makes me feel good when I eat it and leaves me feeling good for hours afterward, and it’s no wonder that I keep going back to that poisoned well.

I can’t help myself.

That’s why my previous attempts to “dry out” from the sugar stuff – kick the habit, so to speak – have failed. Sure, I feel much healthier when I keep away from the sugar – but a gnawing emotional emptiness fills me and I can’t put up with that forever.

So what I really need to do is find others sources of the pleasure/reward I crave. This is far more complicated than it seems. Human being fixate on pleasures, and the stronger the pleasure, the deeper that fixation goes.

Hence an otherwise rational person like myself, one with a very good imagination, nevertheless has trouble even imagining something else giving me what food gives me. That’s the fixation at work. It’s an easy thing to imagine in the abstract – why, just take up chess, or nature hiking, or anonymous sex – but as soon as it applies to me, something else replacing food is literally unthinkable.

There has to be a way out, though. And it probably involves continuing in therapy and getting through a lot of the junk inside of myself that is the root cause of the whole thing.

That’s the only way to mend the hole in my happiness bucket that causes it to drain away so fast in the first place.

Maybe then, I could be normal.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I really wanted to blog last night, but…. homework happened. I generated notes for three of my classmates, and that took four hours. By the time I was done, it was 11 pm, and I was way too tired to even think about blogging.

Basically, what I wanted to blog about was reaching for the sun.

As represented in this song :

That’s the kind of music that can heal me.

Because it is so exuberantly happy in a way that makes sense to me. Reach for the sun. Look to the beauty of the world to give you the sunshine you need in your life.

My other hero :

I feel like these people can teach me important things about being happy

And it’s about two things : faith, and letting the sunshine in.

Oh, what the hell.

What can I say, my emotions are made of music.

It’s about faith because it is Honey Bear’s deep belief in the sunshine in his heart always being there that makes him so sweet. He has this wonderful fixed notion, and it will work for him for as long as he can believe in it.

And he need no proof other than his own experience to maintain that belief. That’s what makes it faith. In the mind of every true adherent to a religion is a sense of connection to an idea rather like Honey Bear’s sunshine. An infinite, transcendent, benevolent force that can fill the spaces left by society’s inability to meet our emotional (as opposed to material) needs.

And I really respect that. All these people need for their belief is the evidence of their own happiness derived from their faith. That’s quite beautiful to me. I wish I had something like that to draw on.

But no, I chose the path of objective truth, and that means faith is not an option for me. Or at least, there is no clear path to it.

A transcendental experience or two might open the iron gates of my mind enough to let a little faith in.

It’s also about reaching for the sun in the sense of reaching out into the world for sources of strength, meaning, and happiness. Depression is a disease of introverts (mostly) because introverts shut themselves off from the world – we don’t really have a choice, our sensitivities compel us – and generate their own energies.

Which is fine until something goes wrong with their internal power plant and they can’t generate the light, heat, and motion to remain functional. What they need is to go out into the world and make new connections to things that give them the positive energy they need.

But when you’re an introvert, your instincts work against you. An introvert reacts to pain by withdrawing, and that’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Their medicine is out in the world and they are isolating themselves.

That’s the root of the problem. Withdrawal. You need to take in things from the world instead of wallowing in your own poisons.

Home again now. Had supper, enjoyed a wonderful (but naughty) ginger cookie from Bon Chaz, and now I sit me down to write.

I am not claiming that reaching for the sun will be easy. It will be grueling, because you have to go against your deepest and most primal instinct – withdrawal – and that will be ab uphill fight all the way.

Myself, I am still working my way through the cognizance phase of enlightenment. I am aware of the problem and its solution. I have sent out faint tendrils that stretch toward the light like a creeping vine, but as of this moment, the connection has not been made.

But at least I am humble and honest enough to admit to myself that what I had been doing just plain was not working. All my intellectual wizardry did nothing to actually make me any happier. All it offered was the coldest of comforts.

And that’s the last thing you want when you are naked before the arctic winds

So I find myself sifting through happy memories , and looking at what I had then that I lack now. It’s a kind of subtractive analysis, and so far the results are murky at best.

But one thing is for sure : when I imagine happiness, it’s a sunny day.

That’s hardly unusual. But something occurred to me recently : there’s a reason a lot of my happiest memories happened in the summer.

It’s because summer was a wonderful time as a kid. My mother is a teacher, so she was home. So were my brother and sisters. During the summer, we did things as a family, and there was a sense of togetherness and wholeness to the whole thing.

And the days were unstructured and leisurely, and the the grass was green and the sky was blue, and life was slow and easy. All that Ray Bradbury stuff was true.

It wasn’t bliss by any means. But it was good.

And I really want to find what I need to make life good again.

The obvious thing is money. I get by, but there is not a lot of money for pleasures, and I have to constantly monitor my financial situation in order to remain afloat. That is very stressful and fills my life with worry and anxiety.

I want to have enough money that I don’t have to worry about it. I am not talking millions here. Just enough to let me own a home, travel in comfort, and customize my life so I can optimize it for my own thriving.

Along with the money, I need a place in the community, starting with being able to pay my own way. I am so very tired of being a burden on people and if I had a job, I would be able to pay for my own care, so to speak, and I would feel like I was part of society and not merely a burden on it.

I would feel legitimate.

Respect of my peers would come next. I want to be an amazing TV writer, and it would be nice to one day earn a place as a star in the field.

That would make me feel better about myself, I think.

And finally, love. I need love. A man in my life who indulges my antics and lets me dote on him so I can show my love to him. One who is patient and wise and can therefore talk me down when I am freaking out, and in return, I give him the respect and affection he deserves. He would be my rock,and I would be his silly little songbird who lightened his life and made him laugh.

So pretty much Robin Williams to my Nathan Lane in Birdcage.

That is not my every unmet need fulfilled, but it would be a damned good start.

But maybe none of that shit really matters.

Maybe all I realy need to do is reach for the sun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.