Starting my blogging before getting my lunch together this time because after lugging my very full laundry hamper to the washing machine, I feel weak and ill.

And that’s…. not good. I mean, yes, it was a very heavy amount of clothes, but still. It makes me feel scared when something like that takes this much out of me.

It makes me feel feeble and frail and very very vulnerable. Like I am one little push away from being confined to a hospital bed.

But what do I expect? I eat tons of junk food and I spend all day either in bed or sitting on my ass in front of the computer I get almost no exercise and I don’t take care of my diabetes or my sleep apnea or anything else, really.

So no wonder I get winded like I just ran a marathon from just doing my laundry,.

It’s a wonder that I can do anything at all.

Okay. Food time. I will be right back.

---

Well, here I am, back with my usual bowl o’ crap meal.

God, I eat like a child.

I was originally going to make this a Ten Cans based meal but I feel too ill and tired to do anything out of the ordinary, so it’s the usual bullshit this time.

Too sick to eat the food that might make me less sick. Ha ha ha.

Now, where was I? Oh right, the hospital bed.

Well, that’s where I am going to end up, isn’t it? Sooner or later, my crappy lifestyle will catch up to me and all my self-neglect will lead to some truly horrible health event – a heart attack, a stroke, a million other ways my health could go kablooey, and then I end crippled and full of tubes in a hospital bed, strapped down to keep me from yanking the tubes out and going completely insane from the confinement.

You would think having a massive infected wound open up on my left leg would have been enough to get me to straighten up and fly right. And it was… for a while. But then I slipped back into my old habits once it no ;longer felt like a crisis.

And I bet that is going to happen again and again. Bad health event, get it treated till I am more or less well, behave myself for a while afterwards, then slide back into my bad habits until the next bad health event.

And eventually, one of those bed health events is going to GET me, and I will end up dead before 50 or worse, helpless and confined and going insane.

That’s my life trajectory , folks. Enjoy me while I last. I am going to end up dead or out of commission before I even get to be a grownup.

And all because I am too weak and feeble to change my life for the better.

They say depression doesn’t kill you. And it doesn’t. Directly.

But it can be the ropes that tie you to the tracks and keep you from getting away from the train that DOES kill you.

And that amounts to the same thing.

More after the break.

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So-called “Final” Fantasy

Currently downloading Final Fantasy XIV Online. It’s another giant fantasy MMORPG along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, and they are letting people sign up for a 14 day free trial right now, so I figured I would give it a shot.

I’ still playing ESO for now, though. But today I realized that it has a lot less plot than I thought it did, and that is making me more open to trying something new.

ESO has about twenty different areas…. we’ll call them provinces for simplicity. And I thought each province had its own unique plotline. After all, some of them do.

But most don’t, as it turns out. I learned this by going to a province I had never been to before, ready to take the first quest offered me like I had in other provinces, only to find out the plotline was one I had already done in the province of Murkmire.

Repeat for a couple of other provinces I had never been to but had plotlines I had already done, and I finally clue in.

This means that there are fewer unknown parts of the game than I thought. I know there are a few plotlines I haven’t touched, like the one for the isle of Summerset, so it’s not all over til the next expansion yet.

But I don’t think I will be playing for a whole lot longer unless it turns out I hate FFXIVO.

Unlikely. People I know like it. And the beauty of it is that I have never played any of it before, so it will all be poppin’ fresh to me.

I’ve also been playing The Legend Of Heroes : Trails In The Sky, that game that my friend Windchaser gifted to me. I’ve gotten through some of the prologue now, and it seems like a decent little game. Pretty much a standard JRPG, but with above average writing and flashes of real wit.

Windchaser tells me that the game makes fun of and/or subverts a lot of the tropes of JRPGs and anime, and I look forward to that.

That convinces me that the game is made by my kind of people, and that really helps me get through the parts that seem very slow to me.

It’s crazy how much stimulation I need from my games now. I can’t even play games older than a certain point because the crudeness of the graphics depresses me now.

And I hate that. It makes me feel like a philistine. I tend to think of myself as an open-minded person with no prejudices against old art, whether i’ts old books, old music, old TV show, or old movies.

But I have hit a hard limit with old video games. There are games I know are good games I would enjoy, but not without a major graphical overhaul.

At least I have stop trying to force myself to get over this limit. I might not be happy about it, but I accept it.

I guess that means I am now part of the market for these “the same great game but with higher resolution graphics” cheap remakes they are making these days.

Leave me to my shame.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s what’s going on Chez Moi :

1. The Ten Can Challenge is underway. I bought my ten cans of stuff at Sav-On Ironwood last night. Caught some amazingly good deals, so the whole shebang only cost me $15. I got some soups, some baked beans, some flakes of turkey, and a couple of cans of Heinz Spaghetti. That last one was a mistake, I now realize, because it’s just more carbs. And I sure as hell don’t need more carbs in my diet. So I won’t be getting those again. Plus, I am eating one of the cans now, for lunch, and honestly the flavour isn’t great. The sauce tastes more like tomato soup than real actual spaghetti sauce, and the noodles are a lot thicker than real spaghetti to boot. So, no big loss
2. In Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) news, I was delighted to discover that once I completed both the Northern Elseweyr and Southern Elseweyr plotline, a third plotline opened up where I get to go to an island called Dragonhold, which I am led to believe holds dragons. Crazy. There was no guarantee that anything in particular would happen when I did the two Elseweyr plotlines, so I am stoked that something did. Made all the effort I put it doing the Southern Elseweyr again with my current character worth it. Really looking forward to the new plotline.
3. In other video game related news, my friend Windchaser gifted me a game called The Legend Of Heroes : Trails In The Sky, and as you might expect with a name like that, it’s a JRPG. Not a genre I am super into, but she loves the game and so for her, I will give the game a real shot. I tried it a bit this morning, but I was super sleepy at the time so it doesn’t really count. My sleepy impression was that it was so very slow, as I go through the introduction and tutorial bits, and that this might be a bit of a slog compared to ESO. But I will do it for her.
4. Mood-wise. I have been doing okay. Not great, but not depressed either, except for the occasional moment, so not bad overall. Having a game that I can play for any amount of time and not get bored like ESO helps, as sad as that is. At least I stay busy with something that takes a fair bit of mental effort. Not ideal, but at least I am doing something I enjoy.
5. Not super pleased with how my experiment with writing in my “grumpy old guy” voice in last night’s blog entry turned out. But what the hell, it was an experiment. In retrospect, fixating on stupidity was a bad idea. Too limiting, and despite my attempt to write relatably, I think it still comes across as elitist. Oh well, I learned a lot in the writing of it, and that voice is still very much a work in progress, so it was still well worth doing.

And that’s the latest update from this thing I pretend is a life.

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A Flaw In Our Programming

Here’s a conversation I have had more than once :

Them : “Where do you want to eat?”

Me : “How about this buffet place?”

Them : “Hmmm…. nah, I’m not hungry enough for buffet. ”

Me : “But it’s the exact same price as getting a regular meal at a restaurant plus you get to choose from dozens of dishes and can have as much or as little as you want of any of them for no extra charge. “

(SFX : Wind blowing over tundra )^[1]

Them : Nope. Still not hungry enough for buffet.

To me, my case for buffet is perfectly logical and sensible and if I were a more ignorant and clueless kind of nerd (it’s possible), I might declare the other person to be illogical and unreasonable and stupid.

But no. I get it. To them, the price for dinner is X dollars for Y amount of food. It doesn’t matter (or even register) to them that in this case, they are setting Y at a value that is much higher than it is for non-buffet restaurants. The ratio of X to Y remains the same,. so to them, there is no conflict.

What is missing (from my point of view) is the ability to think numerically and compare values. To me, getting much more for the same amount of money is obviously superior. It’s a no-brainer.

But that’s because I’m a mental mutant who thinks numerically when the majority of people do not. It’s a subject I have pondered many times since I first tried to figure out why math was so hard for some people when I was in elementary school.

Because it’s clearly not the arithmetic. If you graduated from grade 4, you know how to do the arithmetic. So it had to be something more fundamental than that.

Eventually, I decided that there was math, and then there was thinking numerically, and it’s the second one that gives people trouble.

It’s like the difference between knowing a language and thinking in that language. I can think in math. At least half of the human race cannot, or at the very least, has a very hard time doing it.

No judgment. There are plenty of things others find easy that I find extremely hard.

Like learning motor skills.

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Holy crap, I totally forgot that I had not quite finished this entry, and here it is, 7 am the next day. Guess this one’s going to be late.

Oh well. Excrement occurs. I get it right like 360 days of the year. I suppose I could hack the posting date and pretend like I did it on time, but meh.

I am too lazy to bother with such foolishness.

I will talk to you nice people…. well, today, technically.

Tonight’s the night I do it. I buy my ten cans.

As you no doubt recall, my plan is to buy ten cans of whole, healthier foods like soups, stews, chili, baked beans, and so on in order to give myself more solid nutrition to go on and hopefully make myself both healthier and happier.

And I am starting to resist this idea and that goddamned whiny voice inside me is starting up with the “Aww, do we have to do it tonight? Maybe we could…. ” and I am feeling my overall resolve waver, so I figured I had better write about it today and talk myself through the objections so I will be ready to go through with it tonight.

The first objection, as always, is money. This is a sneaky one as it can always disguise itself as a practical concern. My income is quite small, after all.

But this time, that concern is bullshit, because I have the money. I am floating a surplus of around $100 right now from my GST and other tax check, so now is the time to try something new and see how it pans out.

It’s not like I had great plans for the extra money. And I am slowly weaning myself of the idea that some piece of technology I buy will somehow unlock my creative potential and solve all my problems.

I mean, I bought a very good mic with my Xmas Amazon money, and I plugged it in, verified it worked, and it’s just sat there since.

No technology can solve the problem when the problem is depression.

Once I have my cans, the plan is to have one as the main course for supper every night when I eat at home. That means ten decent meals which have protein and those all important B vitamins.

In other health news, I really need to inject some insulin, but I can’t find my swabs. I know I need the injection because I am being tormented by extreme hunger and that means things have gotten pretty bad.

I might inject sans swab. That’s not exactly safe or smart. I inject right into my belly fat and an infection there can lead to a swift and terrible death.

Bacteria find belly fat delicious. Shudder.

But leaving myself like this is also unhealthy. And not just physically. Being crazy frigging hungry all the time put a lot of stress on my mood as well.

So I will make one more good faith attempt to find my individually wrapped alcohol swabs, and then inject regardless.

Washing the injection site with soap and water probably works just as well.

Besides, like with the ten cans, I need to ignore the voice of hesitance, timidity, and surrender in my head, and instead embrace my allies, untapped rage and bloody minded determination to have my way.

I am going to lead a healthier life even if I have to bludgeon a million personal demons to death in order to get there.

More after the break.

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Smart Versus Stupid

Fuck politics. Let’s talk smart versus stupid.

Because there are a lot of stupid people saying and doing stupid things in the world and getting away with murder because nobody has the guts to tell them how fucking stupid they are and I here to fix that problem and I don’t care whose feelings I hurt or whether or not what I say is politically correct.

Fuck political correctness. The truth is the truth whether you like it or not. Grown ups face the facts and deal with reality. Only little babies try to hide beneath the covers and pretend things they don’t like aren’t true.

And the truth is, folks, that the world is in one hell of a mess because the stupids have gotten together to elect people just as ignorant and stupid as they are and it’s these mental midgets who are calling the shots.

And you know I am not talking about education. Fuck education. I don’t give a shit what degree you have from what university. You could have more degrees than a digital thermometer and still be really fucking stupid.

No, I am talking real stupidity here folks. The kind that leads to bad results. Like the man said, stupid is as stupid does, and there’s a lot of stupid being done in the world today, and it’s never gonna stop until someone says something.

Well here I am, saying something. And I will keep saying it as loud and as hard as I can for as long as I can before the stupids shut me down. You can count on that.

For example, you got a lot of people who will believe anything some idiot on TV tells them. Anything! If the right person on TV said it, these people would believe the sky is green, water isn’t wet, and little green aliens live in their toupee.

Now I don’t give a damn what your politics are, that’s just plain stupid.

And a lot of these same people explain away any information that hurts their precious little feelings as all part of some giant conspiracy run by people they couldn’t name for reasons that don’t make sense and that wouldn’t even work in the first place if it was real, which any fool could tell you it is not.

Again, I don’t give two shits about your politics, if you go around spouting that kind of horse puckey, you are as stupid as that makes you look and you deserve to be mocked and dismissed as the harebrained loonie you really are.

Decent, sensible, hardworking people have had more than enough of your bullshit and we are not going to take it any more.

You’re stupid,.stupid, stupid and it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred other fools who think the same thing in your Facebook group, you’re still stupid, and the other hundred fools are even stupider than you are.

So join with me, all the good and decent and sensible people of the world, and call out the stupid when you see it.

And when our voice is loud and strong enough, we will take the world away from the stiupids and put it back in the hands of the good and decent people like ourselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, time to face reality : I was a hard kids to get along with.

Especially for adults. This is a hard truth for me to face because I think of myself as an affable, relaxed, user friendly kind of person who is eager to please and cooperative and easy to be around.

And the thing is, I am and have always been all those things. Up to a point, at least. But I was also a lot of other things that made it hard to deal with me.

Things such as :

1. Being the smartest guy in the room. That’s one thing when you are an adult but quite another when you are in elementary school. The truth was that I was smarter than my teachers and could think rings around them. They had no intellectual edge over me. This is one of the main reasons that….
2. I did not respect adult authority. Nor did I fear it. Adults were just people to me. People I unconsciously treated as equals, which is pretty weird for a kid. I had no sense that adults were wiser and smarter than me and that therefore I should do what they say because they had my best interests at heart. There was also the undeniable fact that…
3. I was undisciplined. Literally. As in, my parents rarely disciplined me. And neither of them were the type of people to provide a lot of structure and discipline for their kids, especially when you are an unplanned fourth kid and they are already tired and stressed from dealing with the other three. Before I went to school, I had no experience of discipline as other kids knew it. So I had never had to learn to just do what I was told. Combine that with the fact that…
4. I am extremely stubborn and willful. I have a very powerful need to be autonomous and I do not respond well to force. Try to force me to do something and it will not go well for you. So that avenue of control over me was not available to adult either. Plus :
5. I was a smartass. Blame it on being the fourth of four. Blame it on being raised by sitcoms. Or blame it on being a smug little prick. But the truth is that I did not take adults seriously And they could tell. Even when I was being good and doing my best to cooperate and do what was asked of me, which was most of the time, I still had a smartass attitude towards life. That meant :
6. I didn’t take school seriously either. I did my school work with contemptuous and sardonic ease because it was all so easy for me. At the time, it would never have occurred to me that by doing so, I was in a sense insulting the teacher and the school system. And finally,
7. I hated being talked to like a child. Even though I was one at the time.

I say all this not to diss myself but to modify my internal narrative of innocent victimhood to include more of the real picture. Yes, I was just a child and as such it was the adults in my life to figure out how to deal with me, and all that.

But it’s also true that I was a weird, fucked up, hyper intelligent kid unlike any they had ever had to deal with before, and so I have to forgive them for not being up to the task.

Truth is, I was pretty hard to deal with. So much so, in fact, that it would have taken a very special kind of person to reach me.

And those are in very short supply.

More after the break.

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This is not enough

I am finally willing to say it : this blogging I do every day is not enough of a creative outlet for me any more.

There. I said it. And I am not taking it back.

I need more. I need something that can contain more of my creative drive and deep need to express myself than these thousand words a day.

The more of my creative energies I can express, the happier a person I will be. I know this. I know it because way way back when I did my crazy ass million words a day project, I experienced periods when I felt pretty good. Not depressed at all.

You’d think that would have been all the proof I needed to justify continuing to do it, but it is, of course, not that simple.

So I have to up my game, and the only way I can think of to do so is to move to a richer form of media. Like a podcast. Or videos. Something.

And here’s the thing. The world needs me.

I know that sounds like a massive brag but I assure you, I have not succumbed to delusions of grandeur. Yet.

I’m waiting for some real world success first.

Seriously, though, I think I can really contribute to the world and that the world needs someone like me who can articulate what people are feeling and who has the clarity of thought to be able to come up with real solutions to the world’s problems and the visionary insight to see what needs to be done no matter how radical or unusual those solutions might seem.

And if I can’t do that, I can at least make people laugh, and that’s good too.

So consider this my official announcement : I am going to get something more than this here blog going. Video. Audio. Interpretive dance. Nude skydiving. Something.

I have all this intellect, talent, insight, analysis, and wit just sitting around gathering dust in the warehouse of my mind. It’s high time I put it to some use.

I just have to get over being scared of how big I might become.

So something is coming soonishly. Don’t know what it will be.

But it will be something more.

Because this shit just ain’t cutting it any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s right. We did it on purpose. Deal with it.

Not a lot on my mind at the moment. What with the weather getting much nicer and the sun shining brightly outside my window, my brain had gone into Summer Mode and is therefore not inclined towards thinking very hard about anything.

Finally did my grocery shopping last night. Normally I do it Sunday night, but last Sunday was Easter, so it got shifted to last night, Tuesday.

Damn holidays messing up my life. Bah.

Ended up buying the same crap as usual. So my canned food revolution will have to wait till Friday.

I just didn’t have the energy for it last night. But now I know this is the sort of thing that will take a concentrated act of will to begin, and that means I have to go into that store with my goals firmly in mind and a good head of steam built up.

I’m calling it The Challenge Of The Ten Cans. That means my goal is to leave Sav-on with ten cans of whatever. Chili, baked beans, corn, flakes of chicken, whatever I can find that seems tasty and isn’t too pricey.

I am determined to improve my shitty diet, both because I want to improve my health by eating like a grownup and because I think it might make me feel a lot better too.

For all I know, what I call depression is really just malnutrition.

It’s worth a try.

Of course, there’s also the fact that having tasty and nourishing food to eat will improve my mood in and of itself.

My diet right now is quite monotonous. I could use more variety.

Over in my other life, the one I lived in Elder Scrolls Online, I am enjoying being a Necromancer, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat disappointed.

Because it’s not that different than being a regular Mage. The spells are basically just Halloween versions of the usual Mage spells with some superficial tweaks in use in order to make them technically new and different.

And I would be fine with that if they had included the Mage’s summoning spells in the conversion. But they didn’t. I thought I would `have a skeleton or zombie or something as a summoned companion by now, but nope. Does not appear to be in the cards.

And I am disappoint.

Still, I get to hurl flaming skulls at the bad guys and summon skeletons that run toward the enemy, hurl themselves bodily toward them, then explode, so it ain’t all bad.

But i wanted an ever-growing army of the undead, god damn it!

Otherwise, things are going fine. My sleep schedule has been a little more random than usual and sometimes I feel very tired and frustrated and depressed, but for the most part my life is pleasant and serene.

It’s not enough, of course. I need so much more than video games and reading and junk food and naps.

But for now, it will have to do.

More after the break.

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When Aversions Attach!
I was tempted to go with When Aversions Attack – after all, it’s just a letter away.

But attach suits the subject matter more.

It was a judgment call. One had to be made, and I made it.

Anyhow. Something that has been on my mind a fair bit lately is aversions. They are an aspect of depressions I have not seen discussed before, and they seem fairly important to me, so I figured I would talk about them tonight.

The simple definition of an aversion is an emotional tendency to avoid certain things. But not just the things themselves, but everything attached to it.

They are a lot like phobias, but they come at you from the other side, so to speak. Phobias react to harmless stimuli with unreasoning (and unreasonable) fear, aversions make you avoid things that might provoke the fear.

For example, I have a mild phobia of stinging insects. That means if I see a bee, I feel fear. That’s a phobia.

But if I avoid walking through an area full of wildflowers because I am worried that I might see a bee, that’s aversion.

Got it? Good.

What I have seen in my own case is that depression causes me to develop aversions to things very easily, and once they are formed, they rapidly sink deep into the bedrock of my psyche until before long, going against them seems impossible.

And like a phobia, it feeds upon itself. After all, if last time you thought about a subject, you got scared, then you will naturally avoid thinking about that subject again, and if the reaction is strong enough, other subjects that are merely attached by association (as opposed to logic) to said subject might get attached to the aversion as well.

For example, my fear of stinging insects is one thing. But if the last time the phobia was triggered, I was at an outdoor ice cream stand, I might avoid those as well in fear of triggering the phobia by association.

The problem arises when depression makes you form aversions easily and said aversions become rock solid compulsions in very little time.

It’s not hard to see that before long, you have so many of these aversions and phobias and compulsions that it becomes impossible to do anything, and they all merge together into depression’s familiar desire to not do anything at all.

The solution is as simple as it is difficult : you have to override the aversion and do the thing it tells you not to do.

The secret rule of all aversions is “if you do this, something terrible will happen”, and the only way to bust that aversion is to do the thing and see that, even if it results in something bad happening, it is still not nearly as bad as my aversion told me it would be. It happened, I am still here, and it was really no big deal. ”

Aversions survive because they make you too scared to think in specific terms. Once you ask yourself, “No, seriously, what is the actual worst that could happen?”, the “Something Terrible” of infinite undesirability disappears and is replaced by a concrete, finite fear that is, mathematically speaking, infinitely smaller.

Again, I am not saying this is easy. Everything in your mind will be screaming at you not to do it. Your depression/anxiety will do everything it can to keep you from doing it. Doing it will feel like you are lifting a hundred million pounds off your chest.

But if you lean into it and persist, the relief when you finally do the thing will make it all worth while, as will the sense of victory over your depression/anxiety.

So fight the friction, folks. It only hurts until you win.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Patient readers will recall that when I was a little kid, nobody would take the time to actually teach me to do things.

Nobody had the time or the patience to do it. ^[1] And I was far too timid and shy to demand someone teach me.

That didn’t keep them from making me feel bad for not being able to do the things they had expressly forbid me to do or even try, of course.

The message was clear : I was a useless person who couldn’t do anything right and that meant I would forever be a burden on others.

And I still feel that way today, 40+ years later. That shit got programmed into me deep. I still feel like there is no point in my trying to do things for myself because I will inevitably fuck it up, make things far far worse, and end up wishing I had never tried.

But there’s another factor in the equation. It’s called motor dyslexia.

Or at least it was. Now it’s called motor dysgraphia.

I am glad, because motor dyslexia was a terrible term for it. It did get the basic idea (like dyslexia, but for motor skills) across, but still, ick.

I now believe that I have had a learning disability this whole time. It makes it very hard for me to learn physical skills. I handle language, logic, memory, and so on quite well, but when it comes to doing things with my hands, I am a dunce.

I had great difficulty in learning cursive writing. I could not learn to do arts and crafts at all. Gym was a nightmare.

And it all comes back to a lack of fine motor control that borders on a disability.

For as long as I can remember, when I look at things, I do not see a clear fixed image. Instead, it’s like someone is constantly making fine adjustments to the focus. In order to compensate for this. I look at things from more than one angle by tilting my head slightly, and looking more out of one eye, then the other.

This makes it nearly impossible for me to make my hands do what the mind wants them to do. The eye guides the hand and the eye does not work right.

And I have tried many times to explain this to teachers, doctors, optometrists, and siblings, but I have never been able to get the idea across at all.

But it’s always been there, forcing me to see my world in little snapshots and glimpses, and making it very hard to cope with the world because of how hard things are for me to do and how helpless and vulnerable that makes me feel.

The one big exception is text. Words. I can read words and understand them despite what is wrong with my brain/eyes. I can write it too.

Words are my friend.

Absolutely anything, even seemingly trivial things, that require fine motor control are the enemy and to be avoided at all costs.

And that is extremely limiting.

Makes me wonder if it is treatable in an adult. There might be some brilliant therapy that teaches people to overcome the bad info from their eyes.Maybe even correct it.

Or maybe there is some kind of prosthetic that would help. Or barring that, some other form of disability assistance.

Because this shit has really fucked wth my life.

Would be nice if I could make it stop.

More after the break.

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More about my learning disability

Face it, that’s what it is. If fine motor skills were intelligence, I would be considered retarded. I’d score way below my age/grade level.

It’s like a milder form of savantism, or savant syndrome as it is currently known. In savantism, you have someone who is severely mentally impaired but is hyper-talented in one particular limited field.

Well I am not severally mentally impaired. I’m not Rain Man. Nor do I have one limited area in which I am hyper-talented.

Instead, I am mentally impaired in limited ways involving fine motor skills, and very good in that broad category of ability we call “intelligence”.

I’m the kid who got straight As in class but flunked recess and lunch.

And the thing is, my particular learning disability was not considered a big deal. Who cares if the eight year old kid who talks like a kid can catch a ball or write legibly?

He can write well enough to pass all our tests with flying colors and rainbow sprinkles, and that’s all the system really cares about.

But to the system’s credit, they did try to help. There was this very nice Jamaican lady who worked with me to try to get me to write better and to be able to catch a ball and a number of other developmental tasks.

But it didn’t work because I was just plain impossible. I didn’t want to do these exercises, and so I passively resisted. I dragged my heels, I got distracted, I only half-listened to her, and otherwise made a pain of myself, and she could not handle it.

I wore her down. Eventually she broke down in tears of frustration at how impossible it was to teach a kid like me. One who would simply refused to do things he didn’t want to do. One for whom adult authority meant nothing. One who could think rings around most adults and often did so without even trying.

I feel bad about all that now, even though I was just a kid at the time. It’s especially bad because I really liked her.

But somehow, liking her and doing what she told me to do never connected. I suppose my other learning disorder, namely social retardation, was to blame there.

Back then, when I was eight or nine years old, it would never have occurred to me to view the thing as someone trying to help me overcome something major and that I wanted to overcome that something too, so I really should cooperate.

To me at the time, it was just someone trying to get me to do things I found painful and difficult and confusing, so I resisted.

And by that, I meant I was incredibly difficult to deal with. More difficult than any child she had ever dealt with, and I hope, more difficult than any child she dealt with after.

And I don’t even remember her name. God damn it.

Sorry, Nice Jamaican Lady. I really had no idea what I was doing to you. I’m sorry I made you cry. I’m sorry it seemed like whatever progress I made disappeared because I didn’t really want to do it and so I never tried very hard. I am sorry that a nice lady like you had to deal with a brat extrordinaire like me.

If it makes you feel any better, nobody else knew how to handle me either.

So mostly, they just gave up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The junk food, that is.

I eat too much of the stuff. I use it as a side dish for every meal.

And that’s just so wrong. No way I should be eating anywhere near that many carbs. No wonder I am dying a slow neurological death from my diabetes, for fuck’s sake.

And I have tried to reform my habits before by replacing the carb laden chips and pretzels with protein rich almonds and peanuts.

But that did not go well. Turns out, my body can only handle a certain amount of almonds and peanuts and past that point they make me feel kind of ill.

Still tasty, but also urfy.

So clearly this requires a more sophisticated approach. Ideally,I would like to get to a point where all or most of my meals are “real food” meals and not a sandwich, junk food, and a piece of fruit.

Oh, and a sugar free dessert.

Those can stay.

And by “real food”, I mean the sort of things you might find on the menu at a restaurant. Food with substantial nutritive value as well as pleasing taste. Stuff that makes me feel “well” fed and not just “no longer hungry”.

And obviously, given my having depression, things have to be kept as user friendly as possible. Things that only require heating up in the microwave at most.

So I am seeing cans. Lots and lots of cans full of wholesome foods. Canned soups, stews, chili, and so on.

Canned veggies too, perhaps. They can be surprisingly good.

I can imagine a future where when I get hungy, I immediately think of my can opener.

And the thing is, opening a can and dumping something into a bowl then nuking it is not a heck of a lot of work. Sure, it’s more work than just pouring my human kibble in a bowl, but it’s still no big deal.

And, ya know. Could save my fucking life.

So there’s that too.

The main hurdle would be expense. All that canned stuff costs money. Specifically, it costs a lot more than the shitty junk food it would be replacing.

There’s a nutrition tax to be paid, after all. Food with actual nutrition in it always costs more. Cheap carbs are the cheapest thing around. Actual food can’t compete.

I think that’s an adjustment I could make, though. I might have less spending cash under the new meal plan but I also might feel a hell of a lot better in general and that would more than justify the expense.

I might be able to ask for some of those things to be added to our Costco list, too, and that would lighten the financial burden on yours truly.

And to be honest, I am getting pretty tired of junk food and eating like an idiot. I want real food. The kind of stuff that makes me feel like I have really had a meal.

My body cries out for nutrition, god damn it, and I am finally learning to listen.

More after the break.

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Oh right, I’m awesome

Welp, it’s that time again. The time when I try to remind myself as forcefully as I can that I am an extraordinary person with amazing abilities and have a lot to offer the world.

It says a lot about me that I approach this task like it was a deep dental cleaning.

Like yeah, I know it has to be done, and I will probably feel a lot better after.

But the during part of the process is going to be uncomfortable and painful and weird and I am going to have to fight my urge to resist it for the entire duration.

Okay. here goes : I am amazing. I have reams of talent and ability that make me a worthwhile person in both an artistic and a financial sense.

I’m not kidding. I could make someone one hell of a lot of money if they took a chance on me. I look out at the world of art (especially comedy) and say “Pfft. I can do better than THAT crap. ”

And the thing is, I can. I know I can. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Every writing teacher I have ever had has told me how talented I am. So have my fellow students from those writing classes. The survey has been taken and it says I rock.

Even total strangers who wouldn’t know me if they tripped over me have declared my writing to be hilariously funny and wonderful.

I am also, of course, blazingly intelligent. This has been confirmed not by firsthand testimony (though there’s some of that too) but by my entire academic career. I have always received top grades and I have never,. ever had to study. When the test or the exam came up, I just knew the answers. I remembered them.

And without much effort, too. In fact,. for most of my academic life,. my main problem was being bored out of my mind because everything was going way too slow for me.

Even at VFS, I sailed through almost everything. I never even felt the strain until the final semester, and even then, I could have done a lot more.

Hell, I could have done twice as much. Then it might have seemed like work.

And I am also, by all accounts, a sweet and funny guy who is nice to be around. I love to make people laugh. I genuinely care about people and want them to be happy. I am cuddly and silly and witty and nice.

I give great backrubs.

So all in all, I am one heck of a human being, and I have a lot to offer the world. I have a level of skill and ability that could earn me big bucks in the right situation, and I take comfort in that fact and will keep it close to my heart for when the dirty grey sleet of depression tries to freeze me dead again.

I am not a loser. I am not worthless. I am not useless.

I am, in fact, a totally amazing human being who happens to have some problems that are keeping him locked away for now.

There is only one thin little wall between me and artistic glory right now.

And when I am ready, that will fall too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling terrible, but in a new way.

So… yay that.

Well, a change is as good as a rest, they say.

Today, instead of feeling muzzy-headed and squished and confused and all that, I feel over-awake and have a headache and my back hurts.

So, there’s that.

I think I might be burning out on Elder Scrolls Online (ESO). Playing it is feeling like work, even after starting a new character with a different class and species and going to a region I had never been to before.

Then again, I had this same headache when I did it, so my ennui might more reasonably be attributed to that.

There was also a rather nasty shock involved in making my new character. I had been planning to make him a necromancer, a class that had been added since I last played back in 2018.

But it wouldn’t let me. Told me I had to pay for the Elseweyr content back. And I was shocked, because I thought my ESO Plus premium membership got me access to absolutely everything in the game.

But I guess I can see their point in not including it in Plus, because what if I make a Necromancer character and then stop paying for Plus?

They would have to disable that character, and that could get messy.

Still, I was really looking forward to playing a whole new character class, and I am kind of pissed off that I don’t get to do so.

The character I started earlier is an Argonian Warden. Argonians are lizard-people, and Wardens are sort of like rangers in more traditional RPGs. They have nature based powers and abilities. Special attacks based off some of the creatures in the game, ice based magic, that kind of thing.

But to me, being a warden means one thing and one thing only :

You get a pet bear.

A full-sized motherfucking bear.

And he’s no non-combat pet, either. He kicks serious butt. Makes a great companion for an archer like my new guy. I can hang back and pluck arrows at the baddies while my bear handles the melee attackers.

But still, I am not quite feeling this new character. I might ditch and switch. Maybe make a honking huge Orc that uses two handed weapons and wears heavy armor and goes around thumping things to death.

Evil things, of course. I’m not a monster.

Got to level 38 with my previous character, a stabby thief assassin type. Not my usual choice, which is why I chose it.

After doing the main plot with a wizard character of the exact same type that I usually play, I felt like going in a totally different direction.

I have to admit, part of my unhappiness with my character is that the Argonian racial skills are pathetic.

My dude looks awesome, all scaly and sleek and sexy, but the racial skills are all designed around being a support character and I am strictly solo.

I dunno. I should probably lay down and try to get some more sleep before I decide along these lines.

More after the break.

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This could get awkward

If the English language made sense, “awkward” would mean “in the direction of awk”.

Anyhow, here’s this :

I want to talk about social awkwardness,

As patient readers know, in the past, I have defined social anxiety as a paralyzing fear of awkwardness. To the socially anxious like myself, those moments depicted in the video are far more than mere moments of discomfort.

They are huge. devastating, horrible events of enormous emotional amplitude and that slide very neatly into that big box of self loathing labeled “all the reasons we suck”.

They are a terrible condemnation of our very right to be around people, they are a sure sign that we are mutant alien freaks, and they will be remembered by everyone forever and that means everyone hates us now.

This is madness, obviously. In the real world, it was an awkward moment, it passed, and life went on. That’s how these moments are experienced by everyone who does not have social anxiety or something similar. People do not remember them. They certainly don’t condemn us over them. And we would be way better off if we just shrugged them off and kept going.

It’s when we bring the conversation to a screeching halt with our outsized responses to these moments that the true awkwardness sets in.

Not that I am saying we can wish that away and get over ourselves just like that. It’s nowhere near that simple.

But I think it is wise to do a reality check now and then to remind ourselves of what is happening in the real world, the one outside our heads, and to keep in mind that our goal is to make that reality our reality too.

Myself, I have a strange blend of charm and awkwardness, charisma and cluelessness, authority and opacity, intelligence of mind and stupidity of action, and so forth.

So I give out a lot of mixed signals. This makes it hard for people to get a lock on who they are dealing with, something I make harder to do with my shifting sense of self and instinctive resistance to being labeled, defined, or predicted.

To the right people, this just makes me interesting. Or at least, I hope it does. One thing I cannot stand the thought of is people thinking I am boring.

I’d rather they hated me. Or thought I was obnoxious and terrible. Or anything, really, besides what I usually get, which is people not even acknowledging my existence, like I am such an odd phenomenon that their mind just edits me out.

Maybe I need to give people more of something they recognize and understand.

I have no idea how to do that and I am not inclined to do so, either. Come what may. I am ferociously myself at all times, and I am not looking to change that. Ever.

The only other defense, then, is to be who I am at full force at all times, and whoever doesn’t like it can go to hell.

That’s a tough one for me because I can sense people’s emotional responses to me and it is hard for me to not feel responsible for them.

But for my peace of mind, sanity, and future, I’m going to have to learn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bad sleep. Mental fog. Blah.

Pursuant to my recent musing on the subject, I’ve been pondering ways to become more grounded in reality.

It’s one of those things that seems super easy and nearly impossible at the same time.

Super easy in that one might think that all one would have to do is sit and focus one’s attention on one’s physical environment and all the details of it. Think of it as a kind of meditation, but instead of focusing inwards, you focus outwards.

So reverse meditation, in a sense.

But of course, it’s not that simple. For one thing, the idea of doing that scares me. It would mean deliberately leaving the deep dark hole in which I hide from the world.

That is both the point and the challenge of it all. I have squatted in this hole of mine for so long that the idea of leaving it fills me with irrational fear.

Like if I do so, something terrible will SEE me and be able to GET me. Somehow.

Plus, I have tuned my mind to filter out physical stimulation and hyper focus on mental stimulation via media consumption for so long that it’s very hard to imagine moving the dial on that even a little.

The problem is that we are talking about a very deep level of mentation to be tinkering with. The place where sensory input is assembled into consciousness is not something to be trifled with.

But that’s just the depression talking, methinks. It knows that my extending my mind further into the real world and away from my mental cage threatens it.

But I am not my depression and it is not me. What threatens it does not threaten me.

Repeat until believed.

I want things to threaten my depression. And not just threaten in it. I want things to grind it down until it’s gone forever.

But who would I be without it? Where would I be? How could I possibly survive that level of exposure?

Dunno. But willing to find out, more often than not.

Opening the mind’s eyes is never easy and always involves fear and pain.The secret is to do it slowly but firmly. Slowly, so that the mind’s eye had time to adjust and no part of it triggers a sensory overload response, but firmly in that there is no going back.

Man, the words are not coming easy for me right now. I am still so tired. When I am done blogging, I am going right back to bed, no questions asked or answered.

I figure I must need it pretty bad. Which means I have had poor sleep quality lately.

So what else is new?

Oh, and speaking (sorta) of health, I emailed the province about what glucometers are supported by my MSP and whether or not they support the new implantables.

Unfortunately, I did it last night, so I likely won’t get a reply before Tuesday,

But the important part is that the wheels are in motion to get me a glucometer.

So that’s good.

I think I will go lay down now.

More after the break.

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Japanese Food ≠ Sushi

Got myself a Japanese feast from a place called Toku Japanese Restaurant tonight. And it’s a lot of food for the $24.15 I paid for it, so unless some of it turns out to he horrible, I imagine I will be ordering from them again in the future.

You know, sometimes when I am about to eat an “ethnic” meal ^[1], I like to imagine that somewhere there is someone from that meal’s country of origin sitting down to eating a meal of “ethnic” food like a hamburger, fries, and a shake. \

What can I say? I adore perspective. For me, seeing things from a different and unique point of view is inherently pleasurable.

After all, if you only see things from one angle, you only know what one side of it looks like. To really get the picture you have to see it from lots of angles.

Oh, and so far I am LOVING Toku’s food. My miso soup was far richer and tastier than the usual thin broth, and my beloved kappa maki (cucumber roll) is so damned fresh and tasty I want to marry it.

This is already head and shoulders above other sushi places and I haven’t even made it out of the appetizers yet.

In other news, I am encountering an issue that I faced before when I played a lot of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO),which is that by the time I make it to level 37 or so with a character, I start to get bored with playing that particular class and start getting the urge to start over with a new character.

And this is a little frustrating to me, because the logical and practical side of me says “But you’ve invested so much time and energy into building your current character up to this point! Why throw that all the way and start over?”.

Because I’m bored, that’s why. Eventually, the combat turns into the dreaded “grind” and playing the game starts to feel like work.

And seeing as the whole point of video games is to have fun, which is the opposite of work, something clearly has to change.

I mean, there’s a reason we say we play a video game, not that we work it.

Oh, and final review of my Toku meal : fabulous. The corn and potato korrokke (aka croquette) was delish, and my main course, a Teriyaki Rice bowl served in a neato two compartment container, is fab as well.

My only nitpick, and it’s the same one I have with practically every teriyaki anything I have ever had, and that’s that I wish there was more sauce.

When it comes to sauces I like, I want to really taste them. I have been somewhat of a sauce and condiment enthusiast since I was a kid, which led to me being targeted for shame by my older siblings for this fucking thing :

… and that means I want a lot more sauce on my teriyaki than normal.

On the other hand, my teriyaki included a lot of vegetables too, which is aces in my books. A lot of places you get the meat and that’s it.

But I want veggies, dammit.

Picked nits aside, it was a fab meal and I will definitely be ordering from them again.

Now, I will lay me down to happily digest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So this morning, around 5:30 am, I was lying in bed pondering the meaning of the universe when I suddenly realized that my right foot felt like I had a very tighter slipper on it and was tingling in a very alarming way.

And in a sense, it did have a very tight slipper on it, it’s the very tight slipper known as “the skin on my right foot”. Said foot had gone so numb that all feeling in the skin was gone and hence my macabre and terrifying predicament.

So i wriggled said foot and rubbed it and flexed it and such to try to jumpstart the circulation and that helped a little but not enough so eventually I stood up and walked around a bit and that helped more but it was all still pretty freaking scary.

And the worst part is, this shit has been happening for a long time. I’ve just been ignoring it. If my foot went numb I just took steps to get it warmed back up and then went “herp a derp, problem solved!” and went back to my “life”.

Well that’s clearly stupid. So I am treating this as my dire warning that I have to start leading a healthier life or I am going to end up in a wheel chair, a coma, or my grave.

So I need that glucometer. Which means I need to find away around the massive mental logjam that is keeping me from getting it.

Let’s start with excuses. I keep telling myself that what is keeping me from doing it is that I don’t know what glucometers are covered by my provincial medical plan, and that is true up to a point.

But there has to be a way to figure that shit out. The right Google search is out there somewhere. Barring that, pharmacists probably know. They deal with BC’s bureaucratic intricacies all the time.

I wish the email address for my pharmacist hadn’t dropped off the face of the planet. That would have been the perfect solution for me. Email does not set off my social anxiety except at a faint, background level, and so the onramp to action is not very steep at all.

Oh well. That leaves the phone. I do not like phoning people. It scares me. I always feel like I am barging into their lives demanding things, and that’s not entirely wrong.

I could also start taking insulin sans information like I used to do. I mean, if my foot is going numb, I think we can assume there’s not enough blood in my sugar stream and i need to knock that shit down ASAP.

And that means i have to clear all the bullshit and trash off my desk so I can find my goddamned injector needle and needle tips and swabs.

There’s always more steps than my executive dysfunction can handle.

But I will figure this shit out. I have to. My right foot is still tingling slightly, and the next time, it might not come back online at all.

I just have to stay focused and motivated long enough to fix the problem.

More after the break.

---

And we are back.

Well, I managed to pull myself together enough to inject some insulin. The usual 60 units, which is the maximum amount the injector pen can hold at a time.

I guess I am over being scared of setting off a low blood sugar incident. That was my paper thin bullshit excuse for not doing it before now.

Like all such bullshit excuses, it doesn’t stand up to the light of day at all. Sure, I might end up with low blood sugar. But probably not, seeing as I am having serious neurological symptoms from how crazy high my blood sugar must be.

But even if I did go from way over to way under, it’s a problem easily fixed by eating.

I mean, here are home, there’s always lots of food around. The times I have been in actual deadly peril, I was out and about and therefore food was not at hand, and I had to pull myself together enough to get some food into me before I died,

Or I might have gotten lucky and just slipped into a coma.

SO yeah, Got some insulin into me. Got the supplies all dug out of the miasma so I can find them when I decide to take more insulin.

Right now I am feeling like my sugars are a little low, so I am not going to take any now.;

Honestly, all I really want to do right now is sleep. Always at the worst possible times. Like the times when I am least able to sleep are the times my body decides things are safe enough for me to sleep.

No pressure, I guess.

That connects with my theory of why so many of us depressives are night owls. We are very sensitive to things like crowd pressure and herd stress, and so we prefer to sleep through the day, when there are so many people up and active, and only truly come alive whenever most people are asleep.

That’s when we feel it is safe to creep out of our little hidey holes and frolic.

Hmmm. That, in turn, connects with my thinking about how there are the alphas who see what everyone else wants and strive for it, and then there are omegas like myself who take what others do not want and then defend it to the death if challenged about it because it is MINE.

This applies very neatly to us nerds, and it explains a lot of our somewhat fractious nature. If you get a lot of people together, either virtually or at a convention, who have all staked out their tiny kingdoms where they are the sole ruler, shit is going to go down when two or more claim the same metaphorical space.

Add in that there’s a lot of people in fandom who are somewhere on the autism spectrum and thus tend to have one track mind just like the trains they love, and you can see how clashes occur.

Because if two trains are on the same tracks, what happens when they meet? Going around is not an option.

Instead, they smash together until one of them is dead.

Sound familiar to anyone?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.