Well, here I am, blogging at 7:03 am because I am weird.

But like, new weird. Not the old weird that used to be the new normal but is now, quite frankly, the old and boring.

See how much sense that makes?

Anyhow, I am doing part one of my blogginating at this ungodly hour for a number of reasons, which I shall now denote :

1. I just finished playing a marathon session of Fallout 3 because once I started playing this kickass DLC where you get abducted by aliens and get to shoot a lot of them as you take over the ship, I just couldn’t stop. It was like my number one space opera era fantasy come true : to show a bunch of mean abductor type aliens that they picked on the wrong species this time! And after all that alien zapping, I have a lot of extra mental energy to burn
2. I wanted to rave about the DLC,. Mission accomplished.
3. I know that I will be busy with FRED tonight and hence not get my usual 7 pm blogging sesh in, so I figured I would write now and at 1 pm when I have lunch, and work it that way, and finally…
4. I am breaking old patterns to make room for newer, better ones, and let me tell you, it feels fantastic

Let me give you a picayune example.

When it came time for me to do the midnight munchies and viewing stuff with Joe and Julian last night, my cookie situation was thus : I had four Fruit Creme type cookies left, and an unopened box of Woortman sugar free wafer cookies in a flavour I had never tried before, namely orange creme. ^[1]

Normally, I would unthinkingly follow my compulsion to finish things before starting anything new and eat the fruit cremes.

But fuck compulsions. I have been letting them run my life for far too long because it was easier than actually having to make up my mind about things.

Pretty sad, right?

This is why having Mars in Pisces sucks so much. Mars is the planet of action and problem solving and initiative, and Pisces is the planet of passivity and indecision and lack of motive power.

Water doesn’t do anything on its own, after all, except seek its lowest level.

But I am getting over it. I am learning to accept structure within myself. I am willing to sacrifice some flexibility in my shapeshifting in order to grow a goddamned skeleton.

I am so goddamned tired of being so goddamned weak that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get some fire and power into my spirit and stop being so damn limp.

I am sick to death of being theoretically amazing. Potentially outstanding. A genius without muscle, a millionaire on paper, the ghost of someone who someday might have been someone worth noticing.

In fact, right now I might even settle for some genuine, actual, verifiable mediocrity.

At least I would have something real for a change.

More after the break.

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Clueless and adorable

That’s me all right.

And the two things are not unrelated. I think, as the youngest of four, I learned to be cute more of less from birth.

I didn’t know I was doing it, of course. It’s just the survival strategy I evolved into. When you are the youngest, you survive by being adorable and hence attracting nurturing.

The fact that it stopped working at some point did not break this pattern. And the problem with that pattern is that there is a lot – a LOT – of learned helplessness that comes with the package.

You survive by demonstrating that you need help, thus attracting help. In my case, by stumbling around cluelessly and doing the best I can with the unconscious hope that someone will take pity on me and/or find my fumbling incompetence adorable.

That is not an easy thing for any adult man to admit, but it’s especially hard for me because I have built up this picture of myself nobly resisting people taking things away from me because I am not doing them right and doing it themselves while all the time, I now realize, I have been depending on them doing so.

Because we all know what happens when I am left to my own devices.

My devices suck.

But is that true, or is that just the learned helplessness talking? I have thought of myself as a stumbling fool for so long that I honestly can’t tell. It could very well be that I am a lot more competent than I have traditionally let myself be because to actually rise to my own level of competence would be to risk losing the support I get from others, and getting said help is like my primary survival mechanism.

What if I dissuade my helpers and find out I can’t do it on my own? Then what?

On the other appendage, I won’t develop the kind of backbone and independence I crave and that I know is needed for me to grow up if there is always someone there to catch me when I fall.

So I either need to make a clean break from my current lifestyle and go live on my own for a while so I can learn to stand on my own two feet, or simply accept, fully, that dependence is part and parcel of who I am and how I live, and learn to adapt to that while still developing a positive self-image.

Honestly can’t tell which of those is harder, to be honest.

I suppose for now, I will try to make peace with being people’s oddball clumsy pet who is dependent like any other pet, but pays his own way in other ways.

But some day I will need to get away from it all and learn to live on my own.

Only then will I be able to truly become who I am.

And who I need to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it’s back,. That weird, gross, cold feeling that I talked about before.

I feel like I swallowed a snowball and the coldness of it is spreading through my body as it melts. I have turned the heat up in my room and yet I still feel cold as fuck. My right hand in particular feels like it has its own personal draft forever aimed at it.

Is this how skinny people feel all the time? Fuck.

I feel emotionally cold too. Like I have been stranded on an ice floe and pushed out to sea, I feel very alone and abandoned and isolated, and to be honest, I could really go for some serious snuggles right about now.

Anything to get some warmth into me, and remind me that I am human.

I don’t really want to be sitting here writing this. I don’t even wish I was playing video games instead. What I really want to do right now is crank the thermostat all the way up and then get into bed, pull everything warm I own on top of me, and hibernate.

Wake me up for my birthday on May 19. It will be spring by then.

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Bought a game this morning, one called Endless Space 2. I got it thinking it would be a space empire game like those in the Master of Orion series that I loved so much.

Instead, what I got was an incredibly complicated space empire simulator where the “beginner” tutorial bambarded me with so much information, and with such a strange and alienating interface, that I just shut down and quit the game and am now in the process of returning it.

Perhaps, were I feeling better, I might have made the learning curve and been fine with it all. Conversely, if the tutorial had been better designed to give you the information you need more slowly and in a more linear fashion, adding complexity bit by bit, instead of throwing it at me in enormous wads, I might not be returning the goddamned thing.

Oh well. I am sure I will find something else to play.

Even though I am still playing Fallout New Vegas (heavily modded) and recently started playing Fallout 3 (its prequel, and as yet only slightly modded).

What can I say, I am a gamer who is hungry for something new,. Something unlike the two Fallout games. Something low impact and fun, without a heavy duty plotline.

If I had more money to spend,I would get Borderlands 3. I have and have played through every other game in the series, and I am super eager to play the latest one, which came out earlier this year,.

But it’s $40, and that’s more than I can spare given the need to buy presents this month.

But who knows. If I get ahead of my monthly expenses by enough, maybe there will be room for it.

Or maybe I will stumble across something completely unexpected and wonderful.

Anything is possible in this season of sales.

More after the break.

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And I am back after a tasty but not quite satisfying KFC meal.

I feel a little better now than I did before I ate. I still feel cold on both levels and I still want to hibernate forever, but the cold doesn’t cut quite all the way to the bone any more, or at least, not all the time.

Baby steps, and all that.

The fact that I still feel bad despite having eaten suggests that while blood sugar might be a factor, it’s definitely not the only one.

Which raises the possibility that it’s something viral. Or bacterial. Or amoebal. Or…. you get the idea. Something infectious.

Or it could be a sign that something has seriously gone wrong in my body. One of those things I have been helplessly waiting for because I know I don’t keep good care of myself and yet I seem to be powerless to change that.

Logically speaking, the only way that can end is my getting too sick to ignore. It’s already happened twice : first with the pneumonia, then with the massive infection on my leg. Both of those should ave been scary enough to get me to change.

And they were. For a while. But with no further reinforcement, the old patterns came back, and now I live as if those dire events never happened.

So clearly the only thing that will stop my sliding into the pit of oblivion is if something even more drastic goes wrong. The sort of thing that lands me in the hospital, possibly permanently. The sort of thing that takes the choice out of my hands.

Because clearly, what the real problem here is that I can’t take care of myself. And that’s a harsh thing to face bout oneself. I am not capable of doing the things I need to do to stay healthy, and so left yo my own devices, I am going to crash and burn in a way that, to the outside world, will look extremely preventable.

But it isn’t. Depression gets in the way. Of everything.

The worst part of realizing that I am not capable of caring for myself is that I have no idea what to do with that information. As far as I know, there’s no place I can go to and say “I cannot care for myself properly. I need a real adult to look after me. ”

Life does not work that way. Especially for highly articulate and intelligent males who seem like they are perfectly capable of taking care of myself.

Story of my life, really. I don’t get ghelp because I don’t seem like I need help. I am intelligent and confident and seem very self-possessed and capable.

But on the inside, I’m a frozen starving orphan abandoned in the dead of night during the heart of the winter, and all I really want is for something to open the door for me to go someplace where I will be warm and healthy and loved.

But all the doors are locked and I am too timid to knock.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.