Online grocery shopping edition.

So, due to recent complications^[1], I ended up ordering my weekly groceries online instead of getting them in person (so to speak) Sunday night like usual.

Ordered them Monday morning. Could have ordered them as soon as I got the news that Joe’s tire was flat so we wouldn’t be going anywhere Sunday night, but it took some time to adjust to the disruption to my routine.

I was quite pleased to find that there was a delivery slot open the same day. I had feared that I would not be able to get delivery until Tuesday or even Wednesday.

And once I warmed up to the idea,I had fun shopping for my stuff online. It’s all the fun of grocery shopping in person, but without all that walking.

The sad truth is that shopping on Sunday nights is the most exercise I get all week.

On the other hand, I am unable to walk without pain.

But that’s a story for another time.

So I ordered my groceries from my usual Sav-On Foods (Ironwood) then eagerly awaited their delivery between 5 pm and 7 pm. They arrived via some fella named John and I happily started putting everything away.

Only to realize that a ton of stuff wasn’t there.

I had thought it was weird that there was only three bags.

And it was some of the best stuff too. Two thirds of My sugar free cookies were missing, as were my two little bags of Russell Stover sugar free chocolates (mini peanut butter cup and mini mint patties) that I had bought as a treat.

My first thought was that John had missed a bag. But then I saw that my order had come with a receipt of sorts (two printed out pages stampled together) and saw that a half dozen of things I ordered were marked “the following items were out-of-stock and were not substituted”.

Which kind of begged the question of when I would be getting either them or at least a refund of what I paid for them.

Oh, and they had also substituted regular vanilla wafer cookies for my sugar free vanilla wafer cookies, and that was clearly unacceptable as I am diabetic.

:Looks like I will have to disable substitutions in the future.

So I sent Sav-on HQ a rather snippy little email about all this as by this point I was a rather miffed consumer.

Got a reply a few hours later saying that a) they were sorry about the bad substitution and would be refunding me for that but that b) I had not been charged for the things that had not shown up.

And it was only then that I remembered being told when I ordered that I would only be charged for my order when it actually went through the checkout.

Obviously, then, if my guy John didn’t find a thing, it never got scanned and I was never charged for it.

So, d’oh! Once more I jump to conclusions and end up with egg on my face.

C’est la vie.

More after the break.

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What we are missing

As far as I can tell, what is missing in people with depression and present in people without it is a system – a mechanism – that supplies whatever emotional energies are needed in order to maintain a minimum of positive mental health when the individual is not getting them from outside sources such as reality.

This is not to say, of course, that normal people are happy all the time. That’s why it is important to stress that the purpose of this mechanism is to maintain a minimum level of happiness, wellbeing, and so on.

It’s meant to keep you out of the shadows, not to bathe you in constant sunshine.

This mechanism – let’s call it “the sunshine machine”, or TSS – operates almost entirely subconsciously. It has to do so because otherwise the powerful truth-seeking instincts of the conscious mind would be asking it a lot of awkward questions and forcingit to justify itself when the whole point of the TSS is to operate without the need for any reasoning, justification, or external input.

Thus the depression found in recovering truth idolaters like myself. By prioritizing truth above all – veritas uber alles – I was unknowingly sabotaging my own mental wellbeing by keeping my own TSS from doing its job.

The human mind truly does need the ability to fool itself in order to be healthy. Reality may or may not provide all the emotional vitamins and nutrients a healthy mind needs.

And when it doesn’t, we absolutely need to be able to manufacture them ourselves, and the truth be damned if it gets in the way.

Explains a lot of thing, dunnit?

Like religion and faith. Installed early enough in life, religion can act as this TSS precisely because faith requires no proof – it is chosen, not proven.

Thus, the conscious mind is bypassed. And it’s my belief (ha) that this vital connection can remain active even after the faith itself is abandoned.

What matters is whether you have a TSS in your brain, not which kind it is.

But this also explains why it’s so impossible to talk about religion. The very nature of a TSS means it cannot be rationally examined. None of them can survive that.

And yet, and I cannot stress this enough, these religious beliefs are still a deep and fundamental part of people’s psyches.

And this is what you are attacking if you attack someone’s faith. Even if all you are doing is asking innocently logical questions, you are attacking the very core of what keeps their psyches afloat despite a sea of troubles.

Remember that before you judge and mock.

Now the next obvious quest is : is it possible to build a working TSS in the mind of a depressed human being and thus potentially cure them?

I’d like to think it is. But if it’s possible, it would be via means not accessible via our usual conscious minds.

For obvious reasons.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, an update : ordered my groceries for this week this morning. Was pleasantly surprised to see there were delivery slots open for today.

So some time between 5 pm and 7 pm, my goodies shall arrive.

Now I just have to make sure I am awake at the time despite a lack of caffeine in my bloodstream. No groceries means no Diet Coke to keep me going.

And judging by how tired I am right now, I am probably going to spend the rest of the afternoon asleep at the very least.

Guess I had better set an alarm just in case.

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It occurred to me last night that deep down, I am not at all worried about whether or not I can succeed in the world.

After all, I am one ridiculously talented and intelligent person. I am confident that if I could just get my work and myself in front of the right people, they would realize how amazing I am and want me to make them a whole lot of money.

I would, of course, be all too happy to oblige.

So really, it’s a matter of when, not if. When I am mentally healthy enough, I will find my way to the world outside my mind, and enjoy success there.

And that makes it easier to make it through the day for yours truly by giving me a destination pulling me forward through the miasma of my fears.

Life is always better when you have something to look forward to. And having the faith in my abilities to believe that I will succeed makes the whole prospect of trying seem a whole lot less scary.

Something to keep in mind as I make it through the days, one day at a time.

All I have to do is make it out that big ol door.

Wish me luck.

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Half an ass

It’s better to do things badly than to not do them at all.

No really…. it is.

As far as I am concerned, perfectionism is an enemy of art. People get to feeling like if it isn’t perfect, it’s not worth doing, and that’s insane.

Because how will you ever achieve perfection if you don’t do it badly and learn from it?

I feel the need to tell this to myself again and again because I am in the process of murdering all my excuses and this is one of the big ones.

The desire to make videos that were better than my previous work rapidly mutated into the feeling that there was no point in trying because my work wouldn’t be good enough.

You just can’t give depression an inroad like that.

So I hereby give myself permission once more to half-ass it. To do a quick and sloppy job. To slap things together however, throw it onto the internet in one form or another, and call it a day.

Because at the end of the day. I would rather produce a ton of half-assed bullshit than absolute no videos at all.

Some of us, I think, are simply not meant to work on things until we can’t think of any more ways to make it better. I envy the people who can function that way because I can’t. I have to operate on waves of inspiration and get the most out of the energy while I have it and when the wave crashes, so do I.

And then, I truly never want to see the goddamned thing again. It is worse than dead to me. It’s grosser than yesterday’s toilet paper to me. It has to go.

And I think I know why. Part of being the overflowing fountain of creativity that I am is that anything that gets in the way of new ideas must die, die, die.

And nothing gets in the way of new ideas like old ideas.

That’s what kills and disposes of the thing once I am done with it. It is dead to me forever, and nothing can bring it back.

And I say this knowing how crazy it sounds. From an innocently logical point of view, there would seems to be nothing keeping me from rewriting a story I wrote before so that I can do a better job this time.

And I am slowly getting there. The idea doesn’t seem as monstrous as it once did. And I have found myself wanting another crack at things I wrote before.

\So I am very carefully nursing this little flame of transcendence in hopes that one day, it will turn me into a real writer who can just keep hammering away at the thing till it’s finally as good as I can make it.

But the going is mighty slow. I don’t feel like I will be there any time soon.

Till then, Plan B is to explore and try to figure out what makes me this way and how to be a good writer despite this handicap.

The only answer I have for that is “find an editor”. If there was someone who read the thing, pointed out all the flaws, and give it back to me, I could then fix the flaws and pass the thing back and forth with the person until we both agree it’s good.

And this has been known to happen. All it would take is an editor or other gatekeeper who thought I was talented enough to be worth the effort to teach.

Quality ore, from which an amazing author could be smelted and forged.

Dunno where I could find someone like that. But they are out there, I am sure.

I suppose the logical route would be to submit my stuff to lots of different places in hopes that one of the gatekeepers of said places takes an interest in me.

Either that, or I need a bitter, brutal rival who will seize any imperfection of my work and use it against me, so I have to make it airtight.

That seems much more stressful, but I am desperate.

However I get there, I want to become a real writer one day.

And after that, maybe I will even become a real person.

Dare to dream, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.