I’d rather not be floggin’
My misbegotten noggin
For some words to be bloggin’ 
‘Cause my head is foggin’
My sinues are cloggin’ 
But this task can’t be forgotten! 

My mind does strange things when it is impaired.

But yeah. I would rather not be blogging right now. I am all fucked up from bad sleep, as usual, and I would rather just eat lunch and go back to sleep.

Alas, duty calls. So I am going to at least get 500 words done before I lapse back into my daytime coma like a freaking vampire.

So let’s talk about doing things you do not want to do.

Patient readers know that I consider the ability to choose to do something you do not want to do because you want what doing it will get you to be the key to self-discipline and adulthood, and most importantly, happiness.

You heard it here first, folks. Being able to do things you don’t want to do will actually make you happier.

I will now pause to let our inner toddlers wrestle with that idea.

Because when you are unwilling or unable to do so, life becomes very limited and sad. So much of the world is denied you. All you are left with is that which you happen to feel like doing at any moment.

And that means that whatever that happens to be is all you are allowed to want, too. You can’t afford to want any of the vast number things that you can only get via doing things you do not want to do.

So you might as well make peace with getting very little out of life, and hardly ever getting what you want, and living a sad pathetic life.

But hey, at least you proved that nobody can make you do things!

That makes it all worth it, right?

Oh, and feel free to blog about how outrageously unfair it is for the universe to required you to do things in order to get stuff.

Clearly, if the world was fair, you would always get everything you want without ever having to do anything you don’t feel like doing to earn it.

In fact, you shouldn’t ever have to earn anything. Earning is too much like work. Everything you want should just come to you without having to do anything difficult or scary or even just mildly unpleasant due to you inherent luminescent specialness and anyone or anyhthing that suggests otherwise is just plain mean.

It sounds absurd, but I know a lot of people living that exact life. They have, on some level, decided that they would rather live at the very bottom of the social hierarchy and hate their lives and be miserable rather than do anything they don’t want to do.

When you look at it like that, it seems absurd. Surely the life you want is worth some degree of sacrifice. Otherwise, you are stuck in a very tiny rut.

And when I say you, I really mean me.

Blogging part 2 : The Bloggening.

Deja vu. Just took a nap. Woke up and sat down to blog. Feeling ill after the usual effects of sleep and don’t really feel like writing,  just like before.

It must be destiny.

I recently listened to an episode of the Cracked podcast where they talked about how bad we are at looking after our own mental health.

And they are absoloutely right. The public attitude we all absorbed is that minds do not require maintenance. After all, we are our minds, if we accept that our own personal minds have needs and limitations just like our bodies, then that’s like saying we are weaker than the other monkeys, and who would ever admit to that?

A loser, that’s who.

The podcast also nails the fact that our understanding of our own psychological wellbeing is so crude that we acknowledge only two possible mental health states : normal,. and crazy.

And we can’t even properly define them.

Personally, I blame that curse of all Western thinking, the bogus mind/body dichotomy. Deep within the roots of Western thoughts is the idea that while the body might be dirty and diseased and disgusting, the mind is eternal and pure and clean, and therefore does not need maintainance at all.

Nobody consciously thinks this, of course. But it’s everywhere in our culture if you know what you are looking for.  We inherit this ideological legacies via cultural osmosis.

That’s the real work of philosophy : changing that shared ideological inheritance. It’s a somewhat thankless job as to the world, it seems like all philosophers do is have abstruse arguments of no practical value with one another.

Don’t be fooled. The ideas that open the door to the future are born of such activity. Progress demands a steady expansion of not just our technology but our understanding of ourselves and our world.

And it’s us lonely mental perverts who spend way too much time thinking about stuff that expand that understanding and enable all progress.

But especially social progress. We’re the ones who reject the received valuations of our cultures and force our societies to become more consistent with its highest ideals.

God it’s hard to write in this heat. Kind of wish I had chosen a different path with today’s entry. I know in my head what I am trying to convey, but the heat is making my mind too fuzzy to put it into words to my own satisfaction.

What I think of as my ‘writerly instrument’ – that complex machine that turns what is in my head into words on the screen – is feeling very heavy and unwieldly right now.

From that point of view, I am better off on the days that I can wait until 7 pm to blog. It’s usually somewhat cooler by then.

And those would be Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Those are the days when I don’t have anything going on in the evening.

It was different before Joe got sick. When he was working, Sundays and Thursdays were the only days when I had to blog in the afternoon.

But then his eye malfunctioned.

You know what? I think I am going to just end things here. I stand no chance of being able to write a proper conclusion right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had a day of misadventure, which I will now relate.

It started when I woke up at around 10:30 am feeling absolutely terrible. My eyes  were bleary, my stomach felt like something died of a painfuland lingering illness in it, my joints ached, and I couldn’t seem to truly catch my balance.

Not exactly a propitious entree into daily consciousness.

I felt so bad, in fact, that I considered calling my doctor’s office and moving my 2 pm appointment to Thursday if possible.

And yes, I am well aware of the irony inherent in being too sick to go to the doctor. It sounds like one of those things that’s not supposed to happen, like being too hungry to eat{{1]} or too tired to sleep.

But I have been all three of those things at one point or another, and so while a case might be made that they should not happen, they happen anyway.

The universe doesn’t give a shit about “should”.

I felt so bad that I actually called the doctor’s office to cancel, but nobody picked up. If they had, I would probably have gone through with it.

And been spared this afternoon’s Kafka-esque journey.

Luckily for this story’s narrative needs, by the time to get on the bus to get there came around, I had eaten lunch and pulled myself together enough to decide that loser-ing out on a necessary medical appointment by hitting the panic button was NOT the kind of choice I wanted to make, so I got dressed and went down to catch the bus.

But as is sadly typical of me, I waited too long to leave the apartment and missed my bus byh a couple of minutes.

Shadows of VFS and Kwantlen all over again. I was always doing that to myself back then, in the Before Times. Somehow this irrational optimism kicks in and makes me think I need way less time to get to the bus stop than I do.

Then my mind wanders a little, and what seems like a heartbeat later, I have gone from “I have a few more minutes” to “oh fuck, I should have left three minutes ago. ”

So then I end up scrambling for the bus, missing it. and hating myself.

That’s what happened today at around 1:55 pm. So then I had to wait for the next bus.

Fun fact : I had to wait standing up because it was so hot out that the wooden bus bench was too hot to sit on.

Trust me. I tried. I felt like I could feel my nuts roasting and my buns toasting.

So then the wrong bus shows up. Well, wrong-ish. It still took me most of the way there but if I had caught my proper bus, I would have had to walk one fewer block.

That makes a huge difference when it’s eyeball-meltingly hot out.

Eventually, I get to my doctor’s office fifteen minutes late. But of course, that doesn’t mean shit because my doctor is way behind, as usual.

How behind? I had to wait an hour just to get into the examination room and another half hour after that before I saw him.

So I tell him about all the weirdness with my feet getting weird sensations and falling asleep super easily and the weird feeling in my calves and so on and so on, and his reaction was to try one test (tuning fork) then shrug and say ‘Yeah I guess it’s probably diabetic neuropathy.  Nothing we can do about that. ” and that was it.

This did not make me happy. I did the right thing in that I noticed a scary health issue and took it to my doctor and told him all about it, and all I got was a shrug and a perscription for something that might help me sleep.

Because yeah. Sleep was the issue.

And this is not the first time that I have left Doctor Chao’s office feeling like he didn’t really listen and he didn’t really care. He’s a likable enough fellow and comes across as very sweet and compassnionate, and if I told him how I felt, I bet he would feel bad about it and apologize.

But nothing would actually change. Something about me keeps doctors from taking me seriously. Maybe it’s my laid back, friendly manner.

Whatever it is, I am fucking sick of it.

After being told this entire trip was pointless, I went shopping at Price Mart^[2] and picked up some cool stuff. Cucumbers, watermelon, hot dogs, and some brand of freezies I never heard of before but they didn’t have my usual brand.

Grr on that.

So once I had made my purchases, I called a cab and waited outside for it.

And waited. And waited. Took 40 minutes for the fucking thing to arrive.

Oh, but the fun’s not over yet, kiddies, because when I got home, I realized that I had forgotten my keys.

And our buzzer doesn’t work.

And I have no cell phone so I can’t just call one of my roomies and get things sorted.

And there is no such thing as a pay phone any more.

And so I am fucked.

Luckily, a nice old lady who lives on our floor let me into the building, but I knock and I knock on our apartment door (because of course it’s locked in the middle of the day) and get no answer.

So I have no choice but to wait at the door to be let in. Like a cat.

And the thing is, I am not built for open-ended waiting. I can’t hack the uncertainty. It was bad enough when waiting for a bus and the doctor and my cab.

Waiting to actually get to come home when I was so close was not good for me.

Eventually, I just stretched out in front of the door and took a light nap. Again, like a cat. What else could I do?

I had a book with me, but I was too agitated to read.

Luckily, after about an hour, Julian came home, and let me in.

Let me tell you, that was a rough hour. But once I saw Julian I bounced back pretty fast and now I am fine.

But today has been One Of Those Days.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.

[[1]] This one needs a little explanation. I was too hungry to eat once because the hunger was so intense that it made my stomach produce too much acid while also producing too much digestive churning, resulting in my being extremely hungry but unable to keep anything down. Ain’t life fun?’ [[1]]

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