Has nothing to do with whatever it is I will end up talking about today. Just happens to be the bit of music currently stuck in my head.

Yes, it’s Nickelback. And I like it. Fight me, nerds!

First, an update : what did you know, my Xbox customer actually DID get back to me via email, and we will be doing the deal at 4 pm today.

She will be a happy Xbox owner and I will be $200 richer. Pretty frigging sweet.

I am going to end up putting most of it on “the card”, as I call it. That’s my reloadable Visa. It is my default savings account, as opposed to my actual savings account, which has the distinct disadvantage of not being nearly as easy to use on the Internet.

I suspect around $150 of it will make it to the card, if not more. Added to my current balance, I will have around $270.

This is starting to look like real money.

Not, sadly, enough to get me home for a couple weeks this summer. That takes at least a thousand bucks. And I have neem feeling terribly homesick lately.

I think it’s the coming of summer that’s causing it. All this sunshine and green makes me want to be back in my homeland of Prince Edward Island where I could hang out with my family and enjoy the weather.

I miss my family terribly. Especially my mother.

Oh, another update : remember that advice column bit I got so het up about?

Well I still think it is a lovely idea but the flame burning in me to do it has gone out. I curse the fact that my inspirations can be so fragile.

When I posted that entry, I was all fired up to go buy the domain, make the website, then post to the Dan Savage forums in order to get the whole thing started.

Well I bought the domain and went to install WordPress on it but my new domain did not appear on the list of possible WordPress domains.

What the fuck.

I got on live text chat with tech support for my web host, and the nice fellow told me that new domains can take up to 24 hours to fully register.

FUCK. Already, I could feel my momentum draining away, and once that’s gone, it’s gone, baby. The moment has passed and it’s never coming back.

But hey, at least I could go register for Dan Savage’s forums so I would be ready when I finally did get a chance to installed WordPress etc.

Dan Savage doesn’t have forums any more.

In fact, I knew this. He shut them doiwn because internet, basically. Because they got all full of flame wars and trolls and people being awful and such.

Well boom went THAT idea. There was no way I was going to be able to maintain a desire to do it in the face of a complete inability to do anything about it. The flame died down and went out. Game over.

And lordy, do I wish it didn’t work that way with me. It’s unfair that I have to do something alien to my nature, namely act immediately, without time to think about it, in order to capture the lightning in a bottle known as actual action.

My, that was a mess.

Actually, the situation isn’t quite that bad.The problem is not that I failed to catch that lightning, it’s that I opened the bottle too soon.

I am quite capable of storing inspiration for short periods of time. It burns and give me a feeling akin to blue balls but I can do it.

But once it is unleashed it has to be put to work immediately or it dies. And like I said, when it dies, it can never come back.

So the exact same idea that I was so pumped up again Friday night is dead to me now. Still a great idea. Still could turn into something amazing.

And iyet, it is Not. Gonna. Happen.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so absolute about it. I might find it in me to start things up again some time soon. I might be able to turn that inspiration into a dream, a big beautiful shiny dream, and those have much more staying power with me than inspirations.

I am so sleepy. And I got plenty of sleep last night. It’s not fair. It’s like I can never truly catch up. I am always running low on sleep.

The sleep apnea probably accounts for a lot of that. But the depression is a big factor too. To suffer from depression is to be at constant war with your own mind and that conflict continues when we are sleep.

That’s why we are tired all the time, by the way. First the struggle drains us of our energies during the day, then it wrecks our sleep at night.

It’s a truly horrifying illness.

And I wonder at the prospects for peace. On the surface of it, this would seem to involve a total surrender to the depression. That’s clearly not going to happen.

That kind of thing could kill me.

But perhaps the struggle can be ended without surrender. A peace treaty, perhaps, hammered out by both sides listening to the other and doing their best to come to a mutual understand and a plan for disarmament.

That would be the solution if this was Star Trek.

But when both sides are you, as is the mediator, it ain’t that simple.

Maybe it starts with legitimizing my depressive feelings. Not acting on them or believing them, just admitting that they have a purpose and a point and doing my absolute best to figure out what they are trying to tell me.

All my demons are incomplete thoughts and/or emotions. If they could only complete their missions, they would disappear.

The backlog is huge. But each message heard brings relief.

That alone makes it worth doing.

But will I actually do it?

We will have to wait and see.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wasn’t sure what to write about tonight and was thinking a life update might be in order, but thebn I thought of that title and I loved it so much it sealed the deal.

Anyhow, tonight, I will do one of my rare but always boring life updates in a vain attempt to give myself the impression that I do things.

Ignore the negativity, folks,. When I say stuff like that, it’s purely to let the bad stuff out.

It actually makes me feel a lot better. How messed up is that?

So, life. Loathe it or ignore it. What’s up in mine recently.

Well I am finally getting aroud to selling that Xbox One S : Minecraft Edition that I won last Xmas from the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

I put it up for sale on the local craigslist and got five offers almost immediately. I was pleased because my depression was telling me that nobody would response, that I was asking for too much money ($200), and that it would all end in heartbreak and ruin.

Now you know why it took me so long to get around to selling the damned thing.

Now I have never sold anything online before, so I didn’t know what to expect. And the first thing that surprised me was something that is obvious if I tell you about it but that had never occurred to me before putting something up for sale and getting multiple offers on it.

Namely, that now I had to choose who got it.

That wasn’t a responsibility or a decision I had anticipated, even though, as I said, it seems pretty obvious to me now.

Honestly, I blame the depression. When you don’t think you will even get one offer, the last thing that will occur to you is what to do with multiple offers.

SO I experienced a short but painful period of existential strife and self-pity before making the obvious decision to do it on a first come first served basis.

Should there have been -‘s in that phrase?

So I contacted the first person who offered. And then I encountered the second unexpected problem : what if said person tends to be somewhat of a flake?

Nothing horrible, kust taking like two or three days to respond to an email. That drags things out in a most annoying fashion and makes it impossible to actually schedule a time to meet up and do the deal because by the time she replies, whatever date and time I have suggested has passed into the past.

I got so frustrated that I actually contacted the next person in line to buy the thing. Bad idea, because what if she actually emails me after that?

And she did. So I had to tell the second person um, nope, sorry. Lesson learned.

I think I am closing in on the deal now. She has given me her phone number in the latest email, so if push comes to shove, I can call her.

That will take a bit of doing, given my social anxiety, but I have a very powerful medicine to help called MONEY.

Calling a stranger becomes way easier when there’s two hundred bucks in it for me. Makes that hesitation just melt away,.

For the most part.

So I will call her tomorrow afternoon and see when is good for her. That’s if she doesn’t email me back before then, which seems probable.

I want the money dammit!

And I am proud of myself for going through with it at last. I did it like I often do things lately, by more or less grabbing myself by the scruff of the neck and tossing myself into it faster than my fears could stop me.

It’s a harsh image, but apt.

I’ve called it “kamikaze mode” in the past because in order to do this kind of thing, I have to put myself in a state of mind where I don’t give a fuck about the consequences, I am throwing myself into it shouting “Banzai!” and hoping to die for my Emperor.

In a strictly metaphorical sense, of course.

And I amd glad I have this mode. It lets me short circuit all the fear and hesitation and paranoia that normally keeps me from doing stuff and just go’er.

But it might also be called “fanatic mode” because it is a lot like a brief attack of mania in that I feel great in a way that could be quite dangerous because in that state, I am immune to fear and capable of anything.

I’m riding the thrill of the moment, the sheer insanity of it all, and that’s a scary place to have to go just to make a freaking phone call.

But ya know…. I do like I do.

In other news, I also finally got around to the medical testing my GP assigned me a month ago and which I pertly asserted I would do the next day.

It went fine. One thing I noted was that the lab near where I live had been rearranged to be a heck of a lot more like the health center I used to go to as a child.

Gone were the little examing-room niches with their harshly clinical feel and gone was the office minimalist look of the decor too.

Instead, all was wooden partitions and carpets and nice ladies with warm smiles.

I instantly felt at ease. It was like I had redecorated it myself. I know how people like me can be made nervous by an excess of the clinical look.

It’s not a rational thing. Rationally, you would think I would want everything to be as gleamingly antisceptic as possible so that I am sure I will not get infected.

But no. What I want is a place that seems warm and human, like it’s someone’s living room that just happens to have a bunch of little stations where people just happen to be there to take your blood or whatever.

To top it off, the nice lady who took my blood did so with such smooth efficiency and accuracy that I barely felt a thing.

For someone who has the kind of veins that like to hide and therefore has a lot of memories of inexpect phlebotomists stabbing again and again, and even wriggling the damn thing around in there in search of my blood.

It is amazing that, after all that, I am still not afraid of needles. I am not happy about them but they do not scare me like they do some people.

There was also an issue with not having a urine sample in me because I foolishly took a leak on the way out of my therapist’s office, but I solved that via a method I will delicatelty describe as “one thing squeezing another” And it worked like a charm.

So everything was fab. That was a good day.

I look forward to the next one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.