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Well it’s official : every time, I get out of bed, my back hurts.

Sometimes quite a bit. To the point where it’s a tad alarming, Like the muscles of my spine are spasming so hard it might break my back.

But that’s probably not going to happen.

Some other health issue will kill me first.

Got the call from the beautiful vampires at Iris Optical. No, the province won’t kick in their $120. They say I am not due for a new pair of glasses till march 2021.

Which is insane, because I am supposed to get a new pair every three years and it has been WAY more than three years since my last pair.

Oh, and apparently I can’t cancel my order now. Presumably because they already have my money (minus the $120) and it’s my fault that I innocently chose what turns out to be the most expensive place to get glasses in the GVRD, according to my Facebook.

Which is bullshit. They could totally cancel my order and refund my money. It’s not like they have even started making my glasses yet. Not when they told me they wouldn’t have my glasses for 7 to 10 days.

Which is also bullshit. If Lenscrafters can do it in about an hour, WTF is with this bullshit outfit taking 7 to t10 days?

Sounds like they mail my order off somewhere. Don’t even make the glasses onsite. And even then, how hard is it to slot lenses into frames?

It’s all bullshit,

My mood is VANTA Black. I want to slay the sun with a bolt of hate. I want to boil the oceans with my rage. I want to rip life’s heart out and eat it.

I want to kick a child in the dick then tell them it’s because God hates them.

Well okay, not really. But that’s how I feel right now.

As you might have picked up from the subtle hints I’ve been cleverly weaving into my prose, my depression is pretty bad right now. It’s been bad for a while now but it’s been even worse since my eye appointment

Oh well. This too shall pass, I suppose.

And speaking of passing, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that my road out of hell passes real close to the cliffs of suicide.

Because liberation will only be found via letting myself actually feel all these long delayed emotions and that’s going to really fucking hurt.

And from that pain will come the urge to escape. That’s what suicide is and always has been to me : the ultimate escape. Escape from the pain, escape from the pressures inside me, escape from the feelings of gross inadequacy, escape from this crumbling edifice of a body before I have to pay the price for all my vice, escape from the existential crisis of choice, escape from everything all at once in my head,.

I want to exit this shitty subroutine, please. I want to fix all the things that art borken inside me then disappear like a puff of smoke in a hurricane.

Jesus. no wonder I like games and stories where the main character starts off with total amnesia so much. I kind of wish it would happen to me.

Alas, no. I am stuck here, in this life, in this body, in this lousy rotten incarnation that should be burned at dawn so it can go out with the tide.

Finally cleanse the world of the stain of my existence.

But that would hurt too many people.

So like Prometheus chained to the rock, I will just stay and suffer.

More after the break,.

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How to be social

First off, let’s get this out of the way : nobody “learns” social skills^[1] and awareness.

Not in the usual sense of the term, anyhow. There was no teacher, no lessons, no tests, and no final exam. There was no books to read, no exercises to make sure you understood the material, and nobody to provide guidance if you got lost.

So people did not “learn” these skills in the way you learned math and geography.

They “learned” them like you learned to walk and talk.

In other words, by instinct. There are no instruction manuals on walking and talking and if there had been, you wouldn’t have been able to read them anyhow.

Instead, we are born with instincts that drive us to keep trying to walk and talk until we succeed. We are aided in this by quite a lot of specialized hardware in our brains that is already programmed for locomotion and language and is just waiting for the child to fill in the specifics of their bodies and their language in order to come online.

And it’s exactly the same with social skills. ^[1] Regular, non-nerdy people learned them because a deep instinct told them to keep trying until they got it right.

And that’s whereour paths diverge, it seems. Some of us keep trying until we learn, and become normal average citizens.

Others give up in favour of the other form of learning. Book learning. They develop the abstract reasoning skills that schools reward, but at the cost of the other sort of learning and future socialization.

What makes the difference? That’s a damned good question. (Thanks. ) Could be nature – perhaps some of us are simply born wired for abstract reasoning.

Or it could be nurture – those of us destined to be nerdy children missed out on socialization at a very key point, possibly because our even earlier childhood left us with an insecure attachment style that gave us a tendency to retreat in the face of challenge.

I honestly do not know. Probably some of both, as with all things.

But I know this : the first step towards overcoming the limitation of nerdiness is recognizing that mundane people do, in fact, know things you do not, and that they did not learn them from books but from trying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.