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.