I think I did myself a lot of good when I got a lot of my VFS bitterness out in yesterday’s blog entry. I had been holding on to that shit for a long time and it felt good to let loose on just  how much being betrayed like that hurt me and how unfair it was that after all I had been through, I got crushed like that.

One thing I forgot to mention : it’s true that in general, people do not absolutely need introductions and recommendations in order to get jobs in television. There’s freelancing, and contests, and all that kind of thing.

But I am not most people. With my massive social anxiety issues, I desperately needed someone to open doors for me. Cold calling people was not in the cards for me. Neither was pounding the pavement in order to pound on doors. I am too fragile for that. I was really, really counting on at least one of my teachers being willing to recommend me somewhere so that I would have a foot in the door and a role to fill and thus be able to get over my social anxiety and make a good impression on people.

So when I was told that would not be happening, that was it for me. End of the line.

But it was the sort of thing that hurts me so bad that it doesn’t even register right away. That’s because I pushed it down into the deepest parts of my mind and then stomped on it a few times for good measure.

Where, of course, it rotted into the fetid morass of vileness that is my current mental state. Like any untreated internal injury, it bled out slowly inside me and poisoned me over time without my being conscious of it.

And now that I have forced the pain of it to the surface, I hope I can deal with it and get some serious healing done.

In light of what was done to me, it’s pretty amazing that I had the strength and optimism needed to land the Daily Uno gig, let alone write an episode every weekday for 18 weeks in a row.

But then I fucked up that gig, and then fucked up again by not immediately getting another, and then Skyrim happened, and I fell off the face of the Earth for a while.

To be honest, I have only recently returned to it.

My three jobs are all in limbo of a sort. The text story writing gig is still ongoing. I wish I had the self-discipline to just push out story after story. I know I have the talent and I know I have the capacity.

But instead I end up doing my same dumb shit for hours. Playing video games. eading. Masturbating. Hanging with the fuzzies. Scrolling through Facebook. Renegotiating intergalatic porn rights. Naps.

Lots of naps.

It’s not what I want to be doing with my life but it’s what I can’t seem to stop myself from doing with my life. It sucks but it is familiar and reliable and that means a lot to someone as emotionally unstable and messed up as myself.

That’s how depression makes people into hollowed out addicts. Every one of us.

Anyhow, so the text story gig is ongoing. But the other two aren’t going anywhere at the moment. The $6 article writing gig is stalled out. The lady who is my handler said she was going to toss me another gig soon but that was ages ago.

Honestly, I am pretty sure I fucked that gig up permanently. I completely forgot to tell my handler that I was going away for Vcon, so over the weekend she assigned me a story, then was like “Hello? Are you ever going to do that thing I sent you?” and then had to assign it to someone else.

Yikes. And that very close on the heels of having to bail on an assignment essentially because I just couldn’t brain that day, and her having to find someone else to do it.

In the two hours before it was due.

So yeah, probably fucked that up. Oh well, it was hardly a dream gig.

And the text companion thing seems to have stalled out too. The new ads went out on Thursday, and we companions assumed there would be work waiting for us then, but the woman running it seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth and so we’re all left milling about and wondering WTF is going on.

I am pretty nervous about one thing : it’s an hourly gig, which means that I am expected to keep track of how many hours I work in some fashion and I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t the slightest clue.

All my other UpWork work has been on a flat fee basis. And that’s how I like it. When it’s a flat fee, I can look at a gig and compare payment to labour and make my decision.

Hourly rates are a lot more…. squishy.

But I am sure I can work it out. Others do. So I have hopes for that gig.

And I might go beat the bushes for something else. I got an offer to interview for a gig making a music video for a comedy song, and I could have one hell of a lot of fun putting together something like that.

Plus I haven’t used my video editing powers in aaaaaages.

And I would be making a MUSIC VIDEO. For a former 80’s kid, that’s like the ultimate expression of the visual storytelling medium.

Music videos played a very big part of my life at one point, especially as a teen. Making one could be a strange kind of homecoming for me.

It doesn’t pay much, but whatev. I am not primarily interested in the money at this pointm I just want to show the world how talented and amazing I am.

The big paychecks can come later.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I figure I am about due to write a third test messaging story.

I wish I knew how to share them here. But they have to be in the form of a spreadsheet in order for the app to understand them and I do not currently know how I would post a spreadsheet to this blog.

Before anyone launches into an orgasmic riff of tech instruction, I am sure it is possible, I just don’t currently know how to do it.

I am not currently hot to learn, either.  I am still not a very healthy person and I lack the mental capacity to absorb that kind of information right now.

Heck, even on my best days I’m not that good at it. There are a lot of reasons why I never went into IT, and that’s one of them.

But lately I have been wondering if I could learn it. I am pretty sure I do not have the abstract logic skills to be a coder but I could probably learn enough of the necessary lore to be a system administrator somewhere, or work in QA.

And at least I would have a normal job skill instead of having gotten trained in a crazy ass field – TV writing – where nobody will even tell you how to get a job doing it and there’s a million other starry-eyed dreamers out there who are competing for the same near-mythical jobs in an industry that does not exactly need more than maybe a thousand writers total.

Funny that it took me this long after getting a $20K+ bullshit certificate for me to think things through that far, isn’t it?

WARNING : Bitterness ahead.

My mistake was in thinking talent and skill mattered. My dumbass self actually thought that if you were amazingly good at writing television, and could prove it, you could get a job writing television.

I mean, that’s how the world is supposed to work, right?

But no, apparently if your teachers don’t like you, none of that shit matters. Worst day of my life was the day that I was told that absolutely none of the teachers who had taught me at VFS would ever recommend me for any TV writing job ever.

A big part of me died that day. I’d spent a year of my life working my ass off for that precious VFS certificate and two days before graduation I found out that it had all been for nothing and I might as well stayed in my pathetic little life.

If I had known that’s how it would end, I never even would have gone to Kwantlen.

But no, big fat sucker than I am, I went to college for a whole year just to prove to VFS that I could handle school and thus qualified for VFS, then worked like hell despite being seriously undermedicated for my severe depression in order to do well in class and show my teachers just what an amazing writer I am, and then none of it mattered because to them, I was just this weird old fat dude who was kind of gross and didn’t fit in and was therefore at the bottom of the peckiing order, ergo not worth investing any effort or time or risk for, and easy to just scrape off their shoes and forget.

So now I have around $26K of student debt I will never pay off and absolutely nothing of value to show for it.

I should at least get a fucking refund.

I still have not recovered from that day in May, 2016. All of my carefully hoarded hope and optimism died that day and I had to start building up my self esteem all over again.

It would have served them right if I had blown my brains out at the graduation ceremony. right as they handed me that worthless certificate.

And the thing is, all those teachers who wouldn’t do a thing to help me knew that I struggled with depression and that school had not been easy for me but that I had come there day after day with near-perfect attendance despite all that. But apparently that did not matter to them.

Not compared to the theoretical risk to their professional reputations if they recommend a super talented guy who happened to be kind of gross for a job.

And the thing is, everyone works over the internet these days so my personal appearance and comportment doesn’t even matter.

I could write amazing things for people without them even having to know what I look like or where I live.

But no – merit didn’t fucking matter. Being the top writer in my class didn’t matter either. Nobody in my class was even closer to being as good a writer as I am. Not even Dan Windsor, and he’s extremely good.

Seriously, Dan. You’re amazing.

None of them were as funny as I am, either. And they all knew it. Everyone there told me what a hilarious writer I am. Others have told me that too.

But again, merit does not matter if you are the social outcast of the group. When your social status level is zero, the idea of any positive qualities being attached to you causes too much conflict in people’s social brains for them to handle so it’s easiest for them to completely ignore all available evidence and go with the version of reality that works best for them personally.

And after all, it’s not like someone with Status Level Zero can fight back or is a threat in any way, so why not shit on them like everyone else?

I mean, what force could possibly oppose that kind of thing? It would have to be like a science, but the opposite. An antiscience. A nonscience. A…. conscience.

Wow, what a weird idea. Reminds me of that other weird thing…. what’s it called? Polarity? Molarity? Oh that’s right…. morality.

Boy, if those two ever got together it would take all the fun out of attacking those least able to defend themselves.

And what kind of world would that be to live in?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.