Got an assignment from Job 3 today, and I just can’t do it.

I am supposed to rewrite some stuff about Microsoft Visio (their diagramming tool) and something called Project (1981 New Wave band?) and I just can’t wrap my head around the technical jargon used in the source material.

So I have given up. For now, at least.I have told the boss to reassign it.

I know that my problem is largely emotional. I am freaked out by the unfamiliar territory I am expected to traipse through in order to do this thing, and that anxiety is taking up valuable mental real estate I could be using to crack the problem.

I know this is true because the rational part of my mind knows that it is a simple rephrasing job that should not be causing me this kind of difficulty. Sure, I don’t know what the terms mean, but that is not necessarily a dealbreaker. They are just nouns.

And I can deal with nouns. Even ones I don’t know.

But sadly, at least at this moment, I am too full of anxiety and panic to do a thing with it. I tried very hard. I tried just sitting here as I slog through the mires of my mental illness towards the goal of actual competence.

But I ran out of energy to do that, so here I am, blogging away, hoping that maybe if I express my emotions in text that I will calm down enough to think clearly.

Oddly articulate for a panicking person, aren’t I? Just one of my many perversities. My verbality is so strong that it can function even when my mind is full of the icy chill of panic freezing my mind into absolute stasis when it should be flowing strong and powerful and getting my shit done for once.

I really miss that kitten article. That, I could handle. It was information I could easily assimiliate and turn into fun, engaging, and informative prose.

I am great at that kind of thing!

But this current assignment is just too much. It’s too much like technical writing and I am just plain not that kind of writer. I need to have some idea of WTF I am talking about in order to be able to write about it.

It’s just another part of the curse of needing things to make sense.

Other than this current shitshow, today has been okay. Tomorrow, Vcon starts, and I am looking forward to that.

And after this freakout crisis, I am really going to need some soothing nerdity.

In therapy today, I was telling my shrink that a science fiction convention is one of the only places where I can relax and be somewhat extroverted without anxiety being a significant factor because amongst nerds, I feel safe.

These people get me. These people are like me. I have more in common with these people than I do with most of humanity. This is my tribe. 

And that, I realize now, really shines a spotlight on one of the main factors in my social anxiety : my inability to connect with most people.

The gap between me and the non-intellectual population of the Earth is so wide that I feel like when I try to deal with average people on a social level, I am shouting across a vast divide and desperately trying to make myself understood.

I would close this gap if I could. But I am not sure I can because of my handicap.

No, not the depression or the anxiety or the diabetes.

My social handicap is my inability to be false. I can’t pretend I am something I am not and that means I have no choice but to be myself at all times, and I am one weird dude who operates on a whole different level than most people.

And I wish I had the strength and courage to be one of those “I am going to be me and fuck you if you don’t like it” type people. And maybe I will be that kind of person one day, when I am further along the path of recovery.

But right now, I am still too sensitive for it. Failures to connect with people really hurt me. I desperately long for positive connection to others but my alien and alienated nature prevents it. Regular people can tell how strange I am and no matter how hard I try, I always end up feeling like people want something from me that I cannot deliver and that whatever my responses are, they are wrong somehow.

I have spent my whole life feeling like I am always getting the answers wrong and disappointing and/or alienating everybody but the few people who get me.

People in my kind of situation often resort to intellectual elitism to balance the scales. Sure, I can’t relate to most people, but that’s only because I am ever so much smarter than they are and they just can’t handle what a fucking genius I am.

It’s not my fault that I am so much better than other people!

Yeah, right. I could never be that kind of person. I hate that kind of person. I find them revolting in a very French way. Not only would I consider that to be a severe downgrade as a human being, but what is the endgame there? Total isolation?

I will cop to not being able to relate to most of humanity…. but I refuse to declare that to be their fault. I would love to be in some kind of working environment full of people like me… but that’s because I might actually fit in there, not because I would finally be amongst the elite where I belong. I appreciate my impressive arsenal of intellectual gifts… but I do not feel superior to those who lack them.

In fact, I quite often envy them.

Because they, at least, stood some kind of chance at fitting in and getting along with the rest of humanity.

Sometimes I think I would trade all my gifts to end my isolation.

Instead, I remain in my lonely palance of ice and snow.

And there is no Prince Charming to rescue me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about gratitude fatigue, shall we?

Yes. We shall.

There are limits to how long you can be truly grateful for something. As someone who has been dependent on the kindness and forbearance of others for my entire life, I can attest to this personally. Every human faculty has human limitations and sooner or later, whatever it is gets tired and the energy powering it is exhausted and the show ends.

I’ll give you a simple example.

Say a co-worker graciously offers to pick you up on the way to work every day. This helps enormously. It saves you a lot of money and time and hassle, and you are super grateful to this person.

And you thank them many times over the next few week, to the point where you can tell they are getting annoyed by it, so you stop.

Fast forward three months. This nice person has picked you up every work day quite reliably ever since they started. You have gotten used to it. It’s a routine part of your day, just like your morning cup of coffee.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, that co-worker tells you that you are taking them for granted and do not appreciate what they are doing for you and they have half a mind to just leave you waiting some morning to teach you a lesson.

And you protest that you still appreciate what they are doing for you and they tell you that you have a funny way of showing it and that you just expect that ride like they owe it to you and would it kill you to kick in some money for gas now and then?

And now you are in a bind. Because you know that, on one level, you are guilty as charged. You have fallen into simply assuming you would have a ride to work every day and you have been getting in and out of the car like it’s a taxi and not a favour someone is doing you and maybe you could have offered to chip in for the gas money, even though they never asked you for any.

And yet, deep down, you don’t really feel like you did anything wrong and you want to defend yourself from this charges and retain your self-respect, but you don’t know how to do so without coming across like exactly the sort of ungrateful prick you are accused of being. Plus – brass tacks time – you don’t want to lose the ride.

Well the problem here is one of articulacy. What you need to say is that you are sorry if you don’t seem as grateful as you did in the beginning BUT nobody can maintain a high level of gratitude over a long period of time.

Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with expecting something that has happened dozens of times in a row to happen again. Even if it is something with a strong human component like someone doing you a favour. Over time, the person getting the favour will inevitably begin to expect it and not show a lot of overt gratitude simply because it has become a routine part of their life.

Essentially, the honeymoon period of this particular relationship is over and it will never again feel like it did in the beginning. That kind of emotional reward relationship is golden and wonderful but it isn’t sustainable.

It’s kind of like how lottery winners are, of course, super hot dog amazingly happy at first, and have a hell of a lot of fun for a while, but if you catch up with them two years later, they are no happier than anyone else.

Eventually, whatever it is becomes the new normal and life settles back into its usual balance and you are left with the exact same human issues as everyone else on the planet : the search for love and acceptance, conflicts between personalities, the people you love the most being the people who can also hurt you the most, and so on.

Human beings adapt to their situation. It’s inevitable. If we did not, the stress of a new situation would wear us out and we would have a nervous breakdown.

Back to the car. As you might have guessed, I have been in the exact situation I have described apart from the having a job part. But I never learned to drive, let alone been able to afford a car, and so I have needed a lot of rides in my life.

So I have had a lot of time to think about what exactly is going on there. And for a long time, I had no response to the situation other than to feel terrible about it and hate myself and conclude I must be a shitty person to take people who are helping me out of the goodness of their hearts for granted like that.

In other words, it just added to my depression.

But over time and through my recovery, I have come to recognize that it is a lot more complicated than that.

It’s not fair to punish someone who is dependent on you for depending on you when you volunteered for the job. It’s not wise to expect to get the same reward from doing a good thing for someone every single time you do it till the end of time. And it’s not right to take your frustrations out on someone you know can’t fight back and who has no choice but to take it.

Even if they do seem to be taking you for granted. That’s just the term we use to describe the falling off of emotional reward involved in doing good for others.

I am not saying anyone in the situation is blameless. People who are both smart and wise realize that relationships required maintenance and that usually comes in the form of the expression of things like appreciation, gratitude, and acceptance.

I am just saying the honeymoon always ends.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I am going to write about tonight. No plan, no fixed topic, no therapeutic intent, just,  ya know, whatev.

Been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of people rejecting new information based on whether it’s consistent with what they already know lately.

It’s a vitally necessary part of our cognitive processes, and as a rough intuition about whether or not something is true, it works fairly well. The odds are good that if new information flies in the face of what we already know, it is BS.

But only up to a point. PAst a certain level of complexity it stops working and you need to switch to a more active and rational way of looking at things in order to get things right. You have to be able to consciously examine a piece of information and check it for things like logical consistency and the nature of the source of the information.

And the thing is, not everyone can do that. They have to rely on the more primitive system. And the primitive system only works if the body of knowledge known as “what the person already knows” is all accurate.

If not, then said system will reject actual, verifiable facts for being inconsistent with the bullshit things the person already “knows”.

And this is not a yes or no response. The more of what an individual already believes the new factoid conflicts with, the stronger the rejection response.

Thus, any body of organized knowledge, however spurious, is more than capable of defending itself against the intrusion of contrary information, no made how true said information might be.

I think this phenomenon is extremely relevant today because of how all us liberal intellectual types are trying to grok the mystery that is the Trump supporter.

It explains how they can be so fact-proof. It seems like madness from the outside that, no matter how much proof and how solid it is, it is impossible to get these people to change their mind about him one bit.

And it’s not just Fox News loving Trump fans. The world is full of people with objectively wrong ideas, beliefs, and so forth, and the modern intellectual often struggles to understand how this can be true without the world decending into a morass of chaos due to everyone living in their own private fantasy land.

The answer, which some might find unpalatable, is that there are categories of knowledge and one might have all kind of absurd beliefs about, say, global economics and it will not impair one’s ability to function in modern society one whit.

People don’t like this idea because, at least to brainy intellectual types, knowledge is knowledge and the truth is the truth and you are either right or wrong about things and it is exremely important to be right about everything.

To that mindset, thinking Hilary Clinton killed Vince Foster and thinking the sky is green are equally bad.

But for the less intellectually gifted, these categories are a very big deal. It is perfectly safe to believe whatever makes you happy as long as these are not beliefs about things that actually matter to our daily lives. This is especially true if one stays in a community of thought which reinforces the happy-making beliefs and provides you with all the talking points you need to assuage that part of your mind that is trying to tell you something is bullshit and you keep rejecting that information because it threatens to put you into doubt. And you hate doubt.

Now none of this means that it is impossible to change the mind of a Trump voter. What it does mean is that direct intellectual assault is doomed to failure because the consistency factor will block objectionable material before it is even analyzed.

Any attempt at pursuation, therefore, must be based on what these people already know and believe. Ideally, all the arguments are entirely based on what they already believe about the world and the point of departure from said beliefs is minimized.

So say you are trying to turn people against Trump. Here are some things that his supporters already believe :

1. The federal government is evil. Well guess who’s running it.
2. Rich people control the world and conspire against the little guy. Plenty of evidence that Trump has done that, but evidence is not key here. So this argument can be tapped into but not strongly.
3. Thbe deficit must be controlled. He’s breaking records with his.
4. The bad guys are the “coastal elites”. He’s from NY.
5. There’s plenty of people trying to fool you and rip you off in this world. Well he has done exactly that to them.
6. He hasn’t delivered on anything he promised.

And so forth and so on. So an effective anti-Trump message would be something like :

Rich people are using the federal government to steal our money! These rich coastal elites think they are entitled to all of our money they can grab, and if our rights and freedoms get in the way of that, screw them. They are running up quite a tab with their cash grabs, and guess who’s going to have to foot the bill? That’s right, us law-abiding taxpayers! They think we are too stupid to know when we are being fleeced, but I say they are dead wrong and that it’s high time for working Americans to rise up against these supposed elites and show them that America is not for sale and that average, hardworking Americans are sick and tired of being ripped off, and they are perfectly willing and capable of using the right granted to the by the United States Constitution to make sure these SOBs pay for how they have treated this great oland of ours!

Note that there is no mention of political parties, specific issues, or individual politicians. That’s because those things are buzzwords and these people know to immediately shut down their minds when they hear them.

But if you use their language and get them riled up in ways they are used to and enjoy, the difference between directing that at liberals and directing it at the real people who are screwing them over will seem like a relatively minor point.

If we, the liberal guardians of civilization, want to save it from the barbarian thinking that threatens to destroy it, we have to be willing to think like barbarians and use barbarian reasoning to appeal to them.

Otherwise, we’ll all be protecting our purity of mind while Rome, and everywhere else, burns to the ground around us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I greet this day with a great big BLECH.

Today has been rough. Last night wasn’t so hot either.

I started feeling bad at FRED. It was sublte ar first, just a slowly spreading sense of energy drain and difficulty in concentration.

But by the time FRED ended, I felt pretty bad. Definitely a bad case of “I think I’m coming down with something” feeling. I kept vascillating between feeling ultra tired and feeling ultra tense.

That sucks about as much as you’d think.

So shopping was less fun than usual. Interesting, though, I seem to stabilize while I was in the Sav-on. I think it was the air conditioning that must have done it.

God damn do I need to live someplace with air conditioning. It would do amazing things for my health, I think.

Doubt I could get MSP to pay for it, though.

Anyhow, so my usual Sunday shopping wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I didn’t feel great and I definitely didn’t feel right but I didn’t feel too bad.

And I Was still feeling okay when Felicity and I left Sav-On, and so initially I told her I would be fine hanging out with her and Joe like we would normally do Sunday night.

But then the effects of the AC at Sav-On wore off and I felt ill again.

So I had to be dropped off home, where I lay on my bed in the dark a while, fucked around on the computer for a while, and then tried to get some sleep.

One bright note : normally I have some kind of food at around midnight. It’s part of my “eat every 6 hours” schedule. If I am home, I make my snack and eat it with Joe and Julian while we watch Daily Show and Colbert on the PVR.

If I am at Felicity’s parents’ place, which I usually am on Tuesday and Friday night, I have whatever snack I bought at 7-11 and/or McD’s on the way over.

But when thing disrupt that schedule, I often end up skipping my midnight meal. Skipping meals is always a bad idea for me. That’s how blood sugar crashes happen. But I end up doing it anyway because I am one of those oversensitive animals that responds to violation of routine and expectations by shutting down.

But not last night! I forced myself to go make and eat a meal despite the distruption, and so the bad situation I faced today was not nearly as bad as it could have been,

Granted, it took my until 2 AM to get myself to do it (hello, executive dysfunction), bt the point is I got there.

So that’s one little victory in the battle against my bad chemicals. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t want to eat, but I did anyhow because that’s what adults do.

And I want so very badly to grow up and be a man some day.

Hell, I would settle for just being a real little boy.

I did get some sleep, not enough, and not in large enough a junk. Probably should have taken a Trazadone to ensure I would at least get some deep sleep, but oh well.

Next time, I will know better.

Repeat until believed.

Today was unfun too. I did manage to get some work done. I wrote slightly more than half of a brand new story for the text messaging stories people. Something much funnier, more accessible, more grounded. Something I am pretty sure people will like.

And it’s fun to write, too. In a way, I wish I could write nothing but comedy for the rest of my natural life.

But I have far too much in me that cannot, as of this writing, be expressed that way. Too many demons with too many jobs to get it all out in one genre, tone, or mood.

So I will do my best to get the comedy in there at least some of the time. It’s so much fun just to be silly and wacky and play around with words in order to make people smile and maybe feel a little better about their day.

But most of my afternoon was taken up between my body switching into “everything must go” mode and doing its best to empty the contents of my lower intestinal tract out the lower exit at fire sale speeds.

So I spent time this afternoon between the bathroom doing evacuation drills and my bed recovering from said drills via lying still and occasionally getting 45 minutes of sleep.

So yeah. Crapping and napping. That’s been my day.

I will finish the story tomorrow afteroon at the latest. Who knows, I might have a surge of energy after midnight and finish it then.

The worst part is that I still feel bloated and full. So either the show ain’t over, which would be bad, or I have a LOT of gas, which would be worse.

Actually, no. Not worse. I have learned to deal with the goddamned bloat n’ float. It used to lead to Bad Times quite reliably, but I can make things vent in relatively safety and comfort now, should the need arise.

I have been slowly making myself eat some supper as I write this. Same deal as last night, no appetite and feeling very full, but I gotta eat or things get very bad.

I know that part of my recent woes is sexual frustration. I haven’t been able to “get there” in over a week and it’s not from lack of trying.

And I get this feeling like there is something I should be remembering to do in order to make it happen. Like, every time I finally get there after days of trying, I think, “Oh right! That’s what I had to do! I will have to remember this for next time!”.

But I never do.

Maybe I should write it down or something.

Or maybe I should just relaaaaaax.

Hey wait…. I think that’s it!

Excuse me, I have to go do something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.