Today has been pleasingly active and productive so far.

Did the bankward thing this morning. Around 11 am, Julian drove me there for my once a month trip to withdraw some cash.

It used to be my once a month trip to cash my cheque, but then I got direct deposit.

Oh so much more convenient.

I haven’t completely given up on my dream of being able to spend the money in my bank account online, but I am increasingly sure that I will have to switch to RBC to do it.

Every time I try to explain what I want to the folks at my VanCity branch, they look at me like I just sprouted a third hand and it’s doing the “wanky wanky” motion.

Anyhow, so as usual, I got them to tell me the balance on the account and withdrew cash based on how much I had in there.

Then it was off to PriceMart so Julian could kindly go in and buy this month’s PayPower card for me.

With $500 on it, which is the limit. Rather inconveniently.

One of these months I’ll just buy two of them.

Then it was time to go back home, where I registered said PayPower card.

Lately I have been able to read the tiny little numbers off the back of the card myself, and thus I have not had to call upon Julian and borrow his eyes.

So to speak.

After that, I hopped onto Instacart to do my weekly shopping.

Had to do it right away because my cupboard was looking mighty bare. I could have gone a couple more days, maybe, but why?

And I am somewhat proud of myself for managing to rein in my out of control grocery spending habits. Only spend 71 bucks.

Which is not the “under 60 bucks” goal I started out with, but still a lot better than the $100+ I’ve been spending lately.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed all the fun food I bought with that money, but I also enjoy ordering in at least once a week.

And it was becoming a serious either/or thing.

Now I can relax and resume my usual blobby shapeshifter form, having some actual things actually done today.

I am slowly moving towards a place where I can deliberately look for things to do besides waste my brain cells playing video games.

And do so with bright anticipation, even. What fun and productive things can I do today to brighten up my life and give me some sense of value and purpose?

Part of me still winces at that level of earnest positivity. But it’s not like my bitterly dark and sarcastic attitude ever made me happy.

And I am increasingly convinced that I am naturally full of love and hugs and sunshine and it’s only the god damned fucking depression that had kept that hidden from me.

There has to be a reason why I have always instinctively shied away from pessimism and cynicism and negativity. Those offer comfort to many people a lot like me, but I absolutely refuse to go there.

The very idea deeply offends me.

But staying out of the deepest dark is not nearly enough any more. I want to start moving towards the light and warmth of the real world.

And to hell with this frozen candyland of mine.

I’m ready to melt.

More after the break.

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Food of the gods

I am happy, for I have hummus.

Hummus is all the proof I need that God loves us and that I could be a vegetarian or even a vegan if I wanted to be.

I’ve never been a super enthusiastic carnivore in the first place. And things like hummus and lentil soup and vegetarian chili are so damned good (and satisfyingly savoury) that I doubt I would miss meat all that much.

Except for the lingering issue of Vitamin B12.

See, I have been an accidental vegetarian. That’s how I ended up with a B12 level in my blood of either zero or unmeasurably low.

Amounts to the same thing, really.

Patient readers know that I never set out to be a vegan. I just got out of the habit of eating meat or dairy except when I ate out at a restaurant.

So I guess you could say I got out of the habit of buying meat and dairy.

Luckily I have corrected for that, and most days I have at least one meal where meat and/or dairy is featured.

Because those are the only sources of B12, folks. We are, in that one sense, obligate carnivores. We have to have animal products of some kind.

The only choice we have in the matter is whether the animal whose B12 we are eating died for our needs or only made a donation.

This makes me really worry about total vegans.

Julian, you’re in the clear because you eat fish.

But total vegans must, if they are strict in their diet, be operating in a constant state of Vitamin B12 deficiency.

It’s actually, quite ironically, a very unhealthy lifestyle.

And furthermore, this hummus is awful.

It’s Sabra classic hummus, and to me, it has a very bitter taste.

I say “to me” because my Spidey sense is telling me that this is going to be one of those times when something tastes fine to everyone else but awful to me.

Perhaps that’s just the depression talking. Perhaps not.

All I can say is that I am bitterly (ha) disappointed. I was really looking forward to have hummus on a Ritz or a potato chip, but this shit is horrible.

Oh shit. And I know why. Because it’s two days past its “best before” date.

I bought the hummus as part of the grocery order before this one, but then ate all the Triscuits I ordered to be its delivery platform before I got around to the hummus.

Life lesson learned. Hummus does not “keep”.

I hope the amount I have already eaten doesn’t make me sick.

But I just might

I was probably better off not knowing that.

I will probably talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I watched the above video, and this came spilling out of me :

I agree with all of these. I would add things like the Cassandra effect. We can see the future (in a non-mystical way) and understand how things work on an extremely deep level, and that puts us in the position of trying to warn people of obstacles they don’t even understand. Remember, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man’s insane.

Another one that I have come across is not anticipating the effect of my deep cynicism on others. My sharp and brutally honesty insights into things are poison for the more idealistic among us, and I try to take that into account but it’s very difficult for me. My mind is hyper focused on accuracy and clarity, and for most people, that makes me emotionally dangerous. Dammit.

I don’t want to hurt anybody, especially in casual conversation. But this machine-like mind of mine knows no pity.

Finally, and perhaps the worst of the bunch, is that the smoothly efficient detachment we cultivate is very good for seeing the big picture and understanding systems but it’s absolutely terrible emotionally.

I often feel like there is an invisible barrier between me and others and it keeps me from truly being “with” people and enforces a limit to intimacy that can be quite harsh for me and for others.

And I know there is something wrong with me on that front. I know that this little robot has a broken antenna and just can’t pick up the same signals of warmth and companionship that keep other humans going.

Instead, I have a an accurate and precise inner world filled with the light that provides illumination but no warmth.

And I long to come in from the cold.

Well that took a turn for the maudlin.

It’s mainly that last section I want to address here today. The first two points, about the Cassandra Effect and cynicism, are valid enough.

I have often felt like a doomed soothsayer and whilst I don’t actually think of myself as a cynic, I sure as hell come off that way to others.

I’m not a cynic. I’m a realist. But then again, that’s what we all say.

But no, I mostly want to talk about this glass wall I live behind and how it traps me in this hellish world of icy abstraction locked deep within my soul.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t lonely. I am pretty sure it started at least as early as my first day of school, but it might have started as early as the rape.

I don’t remember a lot of the time between when my best friends Trish and Janet went to school (they were a year older than me) and when I went to school.

I would really like to know if my babysitter Betty noticed a change in me after I was raped. That experience shattered me.

I am sure I became far more brittle and anxious and sad. Gone was the warm precocious little charmer she knew, to replaced by… well.. me.

Hardly and upgrade.

Anyhow, point is, I have been lonely all my life except for the years before Trish and Janet went to school and my two years of UPEI.

Don’t take that the wrong way, Joe, Julian, and Felicity. You are precious beyond words to me and without you I would probably be crazy and homeless in the DTES by now.

The fact that I am still lonely deep inside has nothing to do with anything that is wrong with you and everything to do with just how harsh the conditions are inside of me.

And like I said in the quoted section above, I truly wish I could come in from the cold.

But I suppose that would mean sacrificing my precious objectivity and reason and all these high powered perceptions of mine.

And that can’t happen until I somehow trust the world enough to le down my guard.

And I can’t see that happening any time soon.

More after the break.

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On forever retracting

Responding to stress by retreating from reality is very maladaptive.

The situations in which that is an effective response are extremely rare.

Most of the time, you are much better off going in the opposite direction and increasing your focus on what is happening at the moment.

In modern brain science terms, that means switching from the slow circuit (higher brain functions, contemplation) to the fast circuit (instinct, rapid decision making).

But that’s not how the IN in INTJ (Introverted iNtuition) works. My mind focuses inward to solve problems. I have unintentionally focused all my development into optimizing those slow circuit functions.

Which is great for school and terrible for life.

I have overspecialized. I have too much of a good thing. WAY too much.

That’s how I ended up with this amazing brain but nowhere near enough life force to get it to somewhere where its powers could do some good for itself and others.

At times, it almost seems like this magnificent mind of mine is less an asset and more like a greedy parasite gorging itself on all my resources and leaving only the absolute minimum required to keep the rest of me alive.

Joke’s on it (and me). It would be far better fed and exercised if it would just let me have the energy and motivation to get myself some kind of place in life.

Preferably some kind of real job, but hell, I would be happy just having a blog popular enough to have a lively comments section.

Give me a community to run of people who actually read what I write and who understand what I am talking about, and I would be a very happy man.

But no, this massive computational engine of mine takes up too much room and sucks up too much of the oxygen to allow for that.

Keeps me on a short fucking leash. One so short that it chokes the life out of me if I try to move one centimeter further away from my teeny tiny comfort zone.

And I am so royally sick of it. It’s so unfair. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with incredible gifts I would love to share with the world for fun and profit, and yet I languish behind the walls of a prison of my own devising.

I desperately want to feel the warmth of this wild and wonderful world. I want to feel alive and inspired and open and free. I want to find joy in life instead of having to settle for mere survival.

I am so very very tired of this frozen existence. I’m ready to melt.

And once the melting ice brings on the flood and everything impermanent has washed away and the waters have receded, I will search the shoreline for whatever parts of me survived, and piece them together to make a brand new me.

One that has been washed clean by the river of tears and therefore finally knows who he really is, without all the icy delusions that were holding him back.

I don’t know who I will be then.

But I look forward to meeting him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The last couple of days have been stressful.

I will try to catch you up.

Last Saturday, my new monitor (this thing) arrived. Boffo! This kicked off my efforts to clean my desk before putting my nice new monitor on it.

This took three days (Sunday, Monday, and most of Tuesday) due to my physical limitations, specifically my lack of endurance.

The fact that the job kicked up a lot of particulates that triggered my “hay fever” (or whatever it is) did not help either.

But I got it done, and I am extremely proud of that. When I unboxed the monitor at last, it was placed on a spotlessly clean desk.

And that felt really good. For once, I felt like I really accomplished something. And that felt really, really good.

I must press that memory as deeply into the layers of my mind as possible so I can use it to fight the bad voices in my head that tell me doing things is pointless, it won’t work and you’ll hate every minute of it, you’ll wish you hadn’t bothered, and so forth.

Bullshit, all of it. I actually quite enjoyed my little cleaning project. Working on something tangible while listening to podcasts turned out to be a highly copacetic use of my time.

So when I sat down to set up the monitor at long last, I was feeling fine. So far, everything had unfolded in a delightfully smooth and orderly way and I was minutes away from using my new toy.

But then I hit a snag.

The HDMI cable Spuug bought me got bent at one end somehow.

Bent as in now at a right angle to the cable it connects.

I have no clue how that happened. My only theory is that it happened when I gently laid the monitor on its back with the HDMI cable plugged into it, and the weight of the monitor bent it out of true.

If so, the damned thing was very flimsy. It’s not like the entire weight of the monitor was on it. The monitor was sitting on my comforter and therefore most of its weight was being supported by its cushiony softness.

I tried for a while to get the thing to work, bend and all. But that did not and eventually the bent end just plain fell apart. Little bristly wires everywhere. And just when I was thinking I might be able to stuff the wires back into the connect and make it work, a big flake fell off the wires.

So much for that.

No HDMI cable means no computer because that’s what my new GPU outputs. So I was now stuck without a computer.

Luckily, I was able to order a new cable off of Amazon. Thank goodness I had just barely enough money to cover it.

So I spent most of today waiting for the damned thing and languishing about with only my tablet to entertain me.

I hate the uncertain sort of waiting. All I had to go on from Amazon is that it would be here “before 10 pm”.

Oh gee thanks, Amazon, for eliminating two entire hours of arrival time.

Oh well, the cable is here now and currently plugged into my old monitor.

Because the new one has one final hurdle, and that’s putting together the stand that supports it. Not optional because the monitor has no way of staying upright otherwise.

There are, of course, instructions on how to put the damned thing together.

But the instructions are just pictures, and I don’t speak pictures.

Damn those cheap bastards for not wanting to translate the instructions into a whole bunch of languages.

So I am going to ask Joe to help. He’s more mechanically inclined than I am (low bar) and between us we might just be able to figure this shit out.

The thing is, I know that I am mentally capable of understanding the instructions. They have a simple logic to them and I am fantastic at logic. I know I can do it.

But I have a psychological block concerning picture learning. I have far too many bad memories of trying to figure out picture instructions and becoming hopelessly lost and very emotionally upset.

That’s why I need Joe. Not only does he have a better chance of understanding the frigging instructions, he can anchor me when I am becoming overwrought.

Because I am not the calm and logical person I thought was.

I am quite sensitive and emotional. in fact. \

And I am fine with that.

More after the break.

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Paging Doctor Costin

I had therapy today (Wednesday) instead of tomorrow (Thursday) because tomorrow my therapist Doctor Costin goes under the knife to get a cancerous lesion removed from his skin.

And I am worried for him. He’s in his 70s, and cancer is scary.

At least it’s skin cancer, which is the most treatable form of cancer with the best prognoses and a low rate of metastasis.

So sayeth the robot portion of my brain. Thanks. robot!

Nevertheless, I fret. Over the decade plus that he has been my therapist, I have grown quite attached to him, and would hate to see him come to harm.

On the brutally pragmatic side, the odds of my getting another therapist here in Richmond are slim to none.

But that doesn’t matter. I just want him to be safe and well.

I would pray for him if I believed in that sort of thing.

And once more it strikes me what a strange creature I am. Part of me is warm, caring, sensitive, compassionate, and loving.

And part of me is a machine of such brutal efficiency that it quite frankly scares the hell out of me.

Mother and the Machine, I call it. So far, I have not been able to dream up a version of myself that includes both parts.

The closest I have come is to think of the robot nanny from the Ray Bradbury shorts story I Sing The Body Electric.

She is both robotic and warmly maternal. In fact, the fact that she’s a robot makes her extremely good at being a nanny because she has no personal motives, no physical desires, no psychological issues, and no desire for gain.

She can devote one hundred percent of her considerable energies to being the best caretaker for the kids she possibly can.

She’s practically an angel. Morally perfect because she was programmed that way.

Bradbury wrote the story because he was tired of stories about robots that are cold, calculating, and inhuman. Why would we make them that way?

So he conjured up the exact opposite of that : a robot that’s maternal.

Now that’s a standard I could never meet, but it at least points to a possible starting point for my journey towards a unified identity.

I’ll make it all fit together somehow, gosh darn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The next time I type to you, I will be seeing my words on the new monitor.

God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, anyhow. I have the clearing off section of the task done and so the next step is to unplug all the components of my computer and remove them from the desk’s surface so I can grease up my elbows, get a podcast or YouTube video playing on the tablet, and get down to scrubbing.

Hopefully the goop residue remaining on the desk won’t put up too much of a fight. Granted, this is a task I can do sitting down – otherwise it would not be possible for me.

But I am still not a very healthy man, and thus I don’t have a ton of endurance.

But whatever it takes, I will get it done. I have learned a valuable lesson from this experience : I actually enjoy tasks like these once I get started on them.

That’s the main energy expenditure : starting. Once I have started, my natural inclination towards finishing what I start takes over and makes the whole thing seem a hell of a lot easier.

And it’s not like I have something better to do with my time.

Even more important to remember is that I am not exactly miserable when I am working away on a task like this cleanup.

That’s just the voice of addiction talking, trying to convince me that if I spend one second more than absolutely necessary without the goddamned electric tit of video games in my mouth, I’ll just die.

BullSHIT I will. All I need is a podcast or YouTube vid to listen to while I work and it’s not a problem at all. It’s barely even a thing.

What’s more, it gave me something physical to invest my energy into and that’s a very good thing. Anything that helps me drain off the excess energy that my overwrought mind generates but then can’t handle is a good thing because that will make for a far calmer and happier me.

Effort is not the enemy. I don’t need to live in a constant state of false energy austerity.

It’s insanity alone that can take a state of constant surplus and covers it in an illusion of deficit in order to maintain its iron grip on my psyche.

Effort is my friend. It sets me free, lets me breathe easily and be comfortable and not be anxious and fearful all the god damned time.

All a nonstop diet of video games does for me is keep me distracted and occupied. It doesn’t make me feel any better. When I close the game I am just as anxious and depressed as I was before I started playing.

I need to do other things, things that take a lot more effort. Things that produce some kind of concrete product instead of just more wasted hours.

It’s a dirty rotten sin that all my wonderful gifts languish unused when I could be using them to make things way, way more satisfying and fun for myself.

I mean, I am a god damned wizard. Legit.

So why am I stuck in this stupid dungeon?

More after the break.

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The crick done rose

Well okay. So I haven’t set up the monitor yet.

Mostly because I have been sleeping. As usual, I took a nap after I finished Part 1 of my blogging, shown above.

Unusually, I slept three hours, and woke up at 8 pm. Which is when I usually (ish) do the second half of my blogging.

My own fault for starting part 1 when it was already 4 pm, which is technically an hour later than I should have.

Which means I could have started this section at 9 pm, but whatever.

Things happen how they happen and there’s only so much control we have over outcomes at the best of times.

I am not going to let my depression use this as an excuse to beat me up over “failing”.

Fuck that. I did what I could. Fate took it from there.

I’ll probably go back to sleep once I have finished my words, too. I definitely do not feel like I am done yet. So odds are that I won’t finish up tonight, either.

Again, you can only do what you can do. My mind and body have apparently decided that it’s time to get caught up on sleep.

It might even been the day’s earlier activities plus the work I put in yesterday that have triggered this outcome. I finally made myself tired enough to get some genuine, decent sleep for once instead of my usual restless and disturbed slumbering, and by God my brain is going to pounce on this opportunity.

And ya never know. After my second nap, I might actually feel up to doing some more work and get to work taking the stuff off my desk and giving it a good scrub.

Nothing it set in stone yet. Anything is possible, at least in theory.

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I’ve been having what I will call sadness attacks lately.

At random moments when I am in between activities, I will get hit with am overwhelming feeling of grief and despair, and I have to just ride it out.

This is a good thing.

It means my emotions are escaping confinement and bypassing my stale and corrupt “rational” mind in order to be felt.

This opens the door to ever more intense emotional eruptions, hopefully leading to the kind of transformative apotheosis that could leader to true growth and healing for me.

Bravo to that. I’m all for it. I have known for a long time that my path to recovery will require me to sacrifice short term stability for long term gains at some point, and I am ready to do it.

And I know it won’t be easy or fun. Psyches as fundamentally rigid and stable as mine do not change easily. It’s going to take something pretty big to shift me.

I might even have to go full blown nuts for a while.

Hopefully it won’t come to that. I would hate to become an even bigger burden on Joe and Julian than I am now.

And I fear ending up in an asylum or the like because I might end up liking the total lack of responsibility for myself so much than I never make it out again.

Depends on if they let me have my computer in my room or not, I suppose.

I can put up with a lot of things if I have my games.

Sad but true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, back by popular demand, my butthole.

Because it’s itchy.

And it’s itchy right down deep, too. This ain’t no peri-anal itching. This is itching down where only miners and proctologists can find it.

And it’s very annoying.

At least I am wise and experienced enough to know that you don’t just scratch an itch every time it itches and for as long as it itches.

That only makes things worse in the long term. It turns a simple itch into one that is swollen, red, and bleeding, and now you’re in a heap of trouble.

It can even lead to infection, if you take it far enough. Show how stupid our bodies are, urging us to do things that will hurt it.

So I am avoiding scratching it as much as possible. Luckily, the itch is mild enough so that as long as I am mentally and physically occupied, such as when I am using Mister Computer here, I don’t notice it at all.

But it still worries me. It’s persisted over two days and several defecations, so I fear that it is here to stay until I do something about it.

And that means a trip to Doctor Chao. One where I have to spread my cheeks and show him my boom boom place.

Which could turn out to be quite interesting if my theory that he is attracted to me turns out to be true.

But either way, it’s not something I am eager to do. But I know better than to just keep ignoring it until it really bites me on the ass.

So to speak.

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The new monitor remains in its box.

I know I sad yesterday that even if I hadn’t finished cleaning by now, it was coming out of its box and getting installed anyhow, but that was hopelessly shortsighted of me.

I should have known that I am not capable of leaving a task half finished. And right now, I am have completed most of the “clearing off” phase but I still have the much trickier “cleaning up” phase to do.

“Clearing off” was and is a lot of work but it’s simple work. Just methodically pick up all the layers of accumulated detritus on the desk and file it under “keep”, “garbage”, “organic matter”, or “paper”.

Things were so much simpler when we didn’t have to sort our trash. I miss that.

Not that I want it back. Just pining for a simpler and more innocent time.

“Cleaning up” means taking everything except maybe my computer itself OFF the desk and then giving the thing some kind of deep scrubbing.

Not sure how that will work, exactly. I am hoping Joe has some ideas. The amount of weirdly homogenized gunk that was on this desk was astonishing.

And, of course, disgusting.

But there’s no way I can consider this desk clean until the scrubbing taking place because even after scraping most of the gunk off with my fingernails, there is still a fingernail proof layer of residues to deal with.

So I am thinking the monitor will debut tomorrow.

But after that, whoa boy…. watch the fuck out.

More after the break.

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A victim of productivity

I’ve been seeing things in the world of Internet opinion talking about how, in modern society, we define ourselves in terms of how “productive” we can be and how, even if we are only being productive towards our own personal goals, how this productivity based mindset is fundamentally rooted in how useful we can be to the corporations and billionaires who own us.

I would argue that even without our oligarchic overlords, human beings have a fundamental drive to contribute to whatever collective they happen to be a part of, and that is the drive our modern day plantation owners pervert to exploit us.

But the fundamental truth of the principle rings true. We are raised to define ourselves by how productive we are and that is a particularly cruel things for us disabled folk.

Because we can’t be productive by the modern capitalist definition. I can’t work. I am, therefore, by society’s definition, worthless.

This definition of worth is a big part of the deep seated guilt I feel about my life and my situation and how everything has turned out.

I have spent my whole life feeling crushing guilt about the fact that I can’t stand on my own two feet and need to impose on others just to stay alive.

I can’t earn. This is killing me.

It’s why despite having a full suite of highly effective counter-arguments to inoculate me against this very line of reasoning, I still feel like an intolerable and intractable burden to everyone and that combination of guilt with an inability to do anything to fix the situation is the kind of thing that leads to the bad thoughts about the world being better off without me and so forth and so on.

These are the thoughts that could kill me. And they are rooted in this misplaced and misdirected instinct to contribute to the collective.

And as of this moment, I have no idea how to forgive myself for this lack of contribution This guilt reaches all the way back to way before I was of working age. My whole life I was both denied the opportunity to learn to be self-sufficient (people were too impatient to teach me) and made to feel guilty for “making” others have to look after me.

Fundamentally, they made me feel guilty just for being alive.

I’m not even supposed to be here.

And I know in my head how wrong that was and that there is no reason I do not deserve to be here and that I was brutally abused by the people I love the most throughout my childhood when they treated me like an unwelcome interloper.

But the change has yet to fully reach my heart. I still have a lot of the bad stuff from my childhood circulating in my bloodstream like heavy metal poisoning and it will take a while for my deep consciousness to work out how to get rid of it.

Being able to write about it here helps a lot. You lovely people who read me make it possible for me to work through my emotions and thus release them, and for that I am infinitely grateful to you all.

I love you all. Thank you for making this all possible. And as always…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Brainwave : I should get a cute lizard plushie I can attach to my computer screen and have him be my monitor lizard!

Anyhow, no new monitor yet. And I am beginning to have doubts about my choice.

I suppose it was inevitable that my feverish mind would eventually come up with a rationally plausible reason to give me paroxysms of self-doubt and regret.

In this case, it revolves on whether I made the right choice in choosing a compromise between resolution and refresh rate or whether I should have gone all the way with 4K resolution and to hell with the refresh rate.

Maelkoth says he can’t tell the difference between 60 hz refresh rate and 120. But all the people on the internet who answered the question, “which is more important for gaming, refresh rate or resolution?” said refresh rate was more important.

Supposedly, high refresh rates prevent blurring when making quick turns in 3D first person environments. And I do play a lot of 3D first person open world games.

But it’s more important to me that things look good. I want high detail graphics that are pleasing to the eye as well as realistic-ish.

Realistic like a good photograph, not like…. um, reality.

After saying his bit about refresh rate, I think Maelkoth sensed he was causing me doubt and said “But I am sure whatever you get will be lovely. ”

He’s known me long enough to get a sense of how high strung I am.

Yup. That’s me. High strung. Overwrought. Emotional.

Hysterical in more than one sense of the word.

I keep repeating these things to myself because it’s a new realization that it hard for me to get used to so it requires reinforcement.

But it is unquestionably true. I’ve always been highly emotional.

And I’ve almost always been in denial about it.

I guess I liked the idea that I was this cool calm rational chess player type who could always choose the best moves in life with flawless logic and sound reasoning.

Which is clearly not true. Like I have said before, I often end up making impulsive emotional decisions when there are too many variables to compute rationally.

And there almost always is.

At least, there is when you have a creative genius’ mind that can always see way more possibilities than most people like I do.

And I think that my depression exploits and exaggerates this tendency toward rational indecision leading to option paralysis in order to keep me in stasis, where it wants me.

Remember, the basic ruleset of my depression is MOTION IS DANGER AND DANGER IS DEATH ERGO MOTION IS DEATH.

Ergo don’t fuckin’ move.

It helps to imagine it as being like I am a scared little animal hiding from a predator, holding incredibly still, its own breath sounding incredibly loud to it, scared out of its tiny little mind by imminent, horrible death.

Except there is no predator. The wolves left the door and got Burger King instead a very long time ago. The only predators left are the version of them I carry in my head.

And so what if they catch me? What can they do? They’re just a bunch of sock puppets for my goddamned depression. They have no real power over me.

They’re just a game I play to scare myself and I can stop any time I want. All I have to do is refuse to be scared of them any more and their bluff is called and they fall apart.

Yes, just like in a million children’s cartoon episodes.

Turns out they knew what they were talking about. Go figure.

More after the break.

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Quest for lasagna

No, that’s not the title of a new Garfield MMORPG.

Here’s how it went down.

I was pondering what I wanted to order when I remembered how I wanted lasagna last week but Pizza Hut didn’t have it.

And for a moment I was a little sad.

But then I remembered that I order through Skip the Dishes, and they have a search function on their website, and I could just type “lasagna” into it and it would show me all the restaurants that had lasagna on their menus.

So that’s what I did. And let me tell you, it gave me a heady feeling of power ro see all those restaurants that served lasagna displayed before me and getting to choose which one got my business.

First place I tried rejected my credit card. Oh no!

Second place I tried my clue finally arrived and I realized I hadn’t updated which credit card Skip was using and that’s why my payment failed.

D’oh! Oh well, I corrected my error and now I have glorious pasta to eat.

For the record, the restaurant is called Romilano Pizza, and this lasagna is pretty damned good. Very hearty and meaty, which is what I was looking for.

Speaking of looking for things, my new monitor has arrived safely. But I have yet to get it out of the box because I am determined to clean my desk off first and it is, unsurprisingly, quite the job.

But to keep this from becoming a gumption trap^[1], I have made a deal with myself that no matter what, the thing is coming out of the box by 2 pm tomorrow.

I have cleared off around 50 percent of my desk, although that area still needs a deep cleaning before I declare it clean.

I dunno why I put off cleaning for so long. Treating it like some dreaded thing I can’t possibly do right so it’s better not to do it at all.

I think it’s more that I fear taking responsibility for my own life. So I just let everything slide so I can stay all turtled up inside.

Sad but true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, did I just buy a $379 monitor?

Specifically this one?

Why yes, yes I did. After looking at a ton of different monitors while consulting with my fuzzy friends and performing much skullduggery, I settled on that particular monitor because it had a really good combination of refresh rate and resolution, it (barely) fit within my budget, and I was really tired of fucking looking.

As usual, I took it about as far as rationality could take me then covered the rest of the way to a decision with rash impulsiveness.

This might explain the low quality of many of my life decisions.

But what else can you do when a decision must be made and there are far too many variables for a mortal mind to handle?

I don’t really have thinking my way through things slowly and methodically as an option. My mind works in tidal waves and lightning flashes and wildfires.

In other words, it works on inspiration. Even my most deliberate and well thought out opinions are the result of a series of intuitive leaps that only then got inspected and verified by my powers of reason.

Hence the N in INTJ. It stands for N-tuitive. (Look, I was already busy standing for Introverted. N was literally the next best thing. )

As counter-n-tuitive as it may seem (OK, I’ll stop), despite my highly logical materialist nature, pop the hood and you’ll find intuition as the engine of it all.

One of the secrets of my genius is that with me, as with a lot of highly creative people, intellect and intuition work together like your left and right hand. It’s like intuition is this massive supercomputer and reason is its sole user.

But where was I? Oh yeah, my crazy new monitor.

It will be arriving tomorrow, which still boggles my mind. And the thing is a whopping 32 inches, which is 13 inches more than my current monitor.

In other words, it’s a freaking beast. I wasn’t looking for a huge monitor at all – not a priority for me – but for some weird reason the 32″ version of this particular model of monitor was $50 cheaper than the 27″ model, so I figured, what the fuck.

Why pay more for less?

Right now, I am devoting significant effort to remaining calm about this major purchase instead of letting the weevils of self-doubt and anxiety burrow into my soul and make me freak out and cancel the order and end up back at square one, only hating myself.

I had the money. Money is for spending. I could afford to get myself something really nice, so I did. End of story.

Like I have mentioned before, the next stop on the Upgrade Express will be a better CPU. That’s going to involve still more skullduggery as I have to figure out what sort of CPU socket my motherboard has, and what CPUs are compatible with it, and blah blah blah. All very dull stuff.

Plus, of course, I have to save up the money.

No rush. I have my blazing fast GPU and enormous new monitor to enjoy until then.

More after the break.

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Things we INTJ’s hide

A video in the SECOND half? How exotic!

Time for my feelings on his points!

7. We hide our trust issues

I try to.

My friends know the score with me. I don’t trust, I verify. If I trust someone, it’s because I have scanned their soul with my highly evolved empathy and judged them to be good people I can trust.

So it would probably be more accurate (and sound even worse) that I have no faith in people. I have no faith in anything. I don’t know if I am even capable of faith.

Instead, I have knowledge and understanding, and do the best I can with them.

That leaves an awful lot of gaps in my psyche. And a cold wind blows through them. Faith, as far as I can tell, fills those gaps.

Must be nice.

6. We hide our overthinking

This one doesn’t really land with me. I don’t think of myself as an overthinker, but I definitely was one in the past. I just learned to calm that part of my mind.

5. We hide our feelings and emotions

Not I, not really.

Well, I guess I sort of do. I certainly never bare my depression to the world, nor all the dark emotions that come with it.

I mostly show the world my sunny side only. Have done so since forever. The light makes excellent cover for what I think and feel in my dark little world.

The fact that my sunny side is very open about my life and expresses a lot of things most keep hidden is just part of the show.

Remember, the number one rule of hiding something is that you must hide the fact that you are hiding something.

But note that I hardly ever talk about what I am feeling at the time.

It has to be transformed by time into anecdotes.

And of course, I can always retreat into being enigmatic.

4. We hide our intuition

Gods yes. Otherwise it creeps people the fuck out.

Especially if we throw my empathy in with the intuition. I learn things about people they think nobody knows and I do it without even trying.

But I keep that shit to myself! Learned to do that in my late teens.

Learned the hard way that what is obvious to me is opaque to others.

It’s still kinda weird to me. These high powered perceptions of mine are such a fundamental part of how I see the world that it’s hard to imagine them not being there.

People must be so much more mysterious then.

3. We hide out arrogance

True, though I don’t think I am very good at it.

When my mind is really humming, my intellectual confidence shines through even if I am trying to pretend I have doubts just like everyone else.

And I know how downright insufferable that smooth confidence can make me.

Don’t know how to effectively mask that except by being self-deprecating.

That only sorta works.

2. We hide our loneliness

Um, yeah. I am not sure I even know how to outwardly express loneliness.

But I am terribly, terribly lonely. Have been for my whole life. And yet, I know that my own uncompromising and judgmental nature plays a big part in that.

I would be much better off if I could just turn off that damned robot brain of mine and just be human with others for a while.

Pretty sure that to do that I would have to start drinkin’.

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

1 , We hide our talents

Yeah but I do it very, very badly.

My urge to show off and dazzle people with my brilliance is much stronger than any urge I have not to make people feel bad by outshining them.

Screw that. I am going to shine, shine, shine. And if you can’t handle it, tough.

It’s what I was born to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was going to call this entry “Closer to the surface”, but then I realized that would mean missing out on a chance to reference and link a song!

Now, does that sound like a song written by a Ayn Rand type to you? I think not.

Anyhow, the reason for the reference is that I have been feeling to my own heart lately. My emotions are more accessible and I can truly feel things.

And lordy, does it feel good.

Like I said once long ago, both mind and body know what kinds of inputs they should be getting, and when those inputs are missing the individual feels distress.

Like when you foot falls asleep. Technically, you’re feeling nothing, and so view narrowly (and stupidly), there’s no problem.

But we know what we are supposed to be feeling, so the realization that our foot has stopped sending signals provokes a kind of body panic that leads us to immediately try to wiggle and stomp some life back into our poor foot.

And even though getting there hurts, when the feeling returns, we feel a flood of relief.

Well it’s that sort of relief I feel when some genuine emotions manage to break through the numbness that grips my soul and make themselves felt.

Even if those emotions are unpleasant. Like the long sad I talked about yesterday.

I wish I could wave my hand like a necromancer and cause all the dead emotions I have buried in my enormous graveyard rise from their graves and line up to be processed.

But I suppose they would probably just tear me apart and eat me. Pity.

---

Had therapy today. Eventually.

See, unbeknownst to me, my phone is fully dead. Can neither make nor receive calls. I was under the misapprehension that it was just the buttons that were dead, but no, as I discovered when my therapist called me at the appointed time, the handset is dead to the world as well.

Leaving me shouting, “Hello?!?” into the receiver like I was the protagonist in a one act play from the ’30s.

I immediately knew what had happened. So I got Julian to roll the rollator (four wheeled walker) and its handy built in seat into the kitchen next to our only other phone.

I needed that seat because otherwise I would have had to stand while I waited for Doc Costin to call back and that’s not on… at all.

I can’t stand for very long at all. Certainly not for the length of a therapy session.

So I sat in front of the phone waiting. I couldn’t call my therapist back because he’s in Calgary right now visiting his kids and I don’t have that number.

Then I remembered that the number I had for him was his cell phone and thus, in theory, should be the same no matter where he is.

So then I had to come back to the bedroom with a pen and paper to write down the number and take it back to the phone in the kitchen.

And I dialed it. Whoops, wrong number. Either I wrote it down wrong, or Doc Costin’s number changed since I first added it to my Google Keep notes way, way back when I first became his patient.

The latter seems like the more probable cause.

So all I could do is sit there stressing myself into a panic attack and hoping that Doc Costin would, in fact, call me back.

He did. Phew. So I got my therapy today and I didn’t have to spend a week thinking Doctor Costin was disappointed in me and angry that I missed our appointment.

Only problem is, I forgot to tell him I needed more meds and so I am going to run out of Wellbutrin before our next appointment.

Normally I would call him and tell him so he could fax in the prescription, but… Calgary.

So I am going to have to ask my pharmacist Simon for enough Wellbutrin to see me to my next appointment.

Why did things get so complicated all of a sudden?

More after the break.

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Hear ny demands!

I’m pretty sure I would be a very demanding boss. Maybe eveb difficult.

I mean, you can’t know how you’ll handle leadership until you have it, and I have never truly been the boss.

I’ve always been dealing with volunteers. People who are working with me but not FOR me, if you catch my drift.

Which is fine. I’ve enjoyed that greatly. But it means I have never had people truly working for me and thus, within sane limits, bound to do what I tell them to do.

I’m not sure I would handle it well, at least at first.

Because I have very specific standards when it comes to what I want done, and those standards might be hard for people to meet, at least at first.

My people would definitely need to learn to listen to every word I say and then do exactly what I said to do.

That’s way harder than it sounds. So I would understand that there will be a period at the beginning where my staff and I would be getting used to one another.

And I know that the whole time, two major sides of my personality would be duking it out : Nice Guy Fru, and INTJ Robot Fru.

Not sure who would ultimately win. Hopefully I would find a happy medium.

Because I definitely don’t want INTJ Robot Fru to have sole command. That side of me is real scary and not very forgiving.

Whereas Nice Guy Fru has the warmth, charm, and charisma to be an amazing leader but would have trouble making tough decisions.

This is starting to sound like the Two Kirks, isn’t it?

Hopefully I would find a way to get what I want without turning into a total prick.

But if not, um…. sorry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling unsettled at the moment. Like a predator that smells prey.

Or like said prey. Both work.

Partly it’s because it’s the end of my fiscal month and I am having the usual financial stress. Never quite enough money for various things left on my card and so I end up fretting over the choices I have to make.

I will probably solve it the usual way : by handing Julian most of my remaining cash and asking him to go buy me a new secured Mastercard from the friendly folks at PayPower.

I was hoping to avoid that this month. I’ve done it three or four months in a row and it always makes me feel like I have failed at financial planning somehow.

And that really hurts.

Eh, who knows. I might be able to get this week’s groceries to just barely fit into what I have left on the card and make it all work.

But if not, whatever., It’s all my money either way, cash or credit, and these fussy little financial compulsions of mine aren’t doing me any good.

Then again…. if I get a new card with $400 of my remaining $450 in cash on it, I could maybe order myself a new monitor quite soon.

Once I figure out what in the heck I want in one.

Absurdly high resolution, basically. If it’s bigger too, great, but mostly I want the kind of beautiful high res graphics my new GPU supports.

Should be easy on the eyes… literally. Higher res graphics should be easier for my weak eyes to focus on.

Which reminds me of one of my wackier invention ideas : software for your PC where you can input the prescription for your glasses and the software then distorts the graphics in the same way your glasses do, allowing you to use your computer without having to wear your glasses.

And as a bonus, you will have total privacy because to everyone else it will just look like a big blurry mess!

I know that this idea is technically possible. But I can’t imagine there being enough demand for it to justify the R&D costs to make it happen, let alone the legal costs from getting it through the various legal challenges Big Optical would no doubt throw at it.

It would have to be the pet project of a group of hardcore graphics nerds.

So if any of them ever read this, go for it, guys!

Just remember to give me credit.

---

Back to my emotions. Always a tricky subject for me.

I suppose enough reason I have that unsettling unsettled feeling is that I haven’t been able to ejaculate in a while.

Um, trigger warning, I guess.

Heck, with my tablet out of commission, I have barely been masturbating at all.

I mean sure, my extensive porn collection is here on this PC but it’s way easier to enjoy my special “me” time when I can do it laying down.

Well I have ordered a new charging cable off of Amazon and it should be arriving some time tomorrow and hopefully that will fix the problem.

If not, I will have to contact Amazon and bitch to them about it. Hopefully they will either know how to fix it or just send me a new one.

I need to jack off in bed, damn it!

Plus I really miss TikTok.

More after the break.

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The long sad

My base mood right now is basically one long, wracking, silent sob.

Which is a good thing, more or less. It means that silent sadness that lurks deep within me and distorts my mood and thus my entire umwelt is finally getting some expression.

I wish I could just let it all out, and not silently either. I want to cry for days if that is what it takes to finally let that sad little boy inside me express the terrible fear and pain he has been holding ever since I was raped at the age of four.

That’s the thing with acts of random, brutal violence : they are so painfully out of context with normal life that it’s very hard to integrate the memory and so they just remain there as this isolated island of pain that can’t be expressed.

Not all at once, anyhow. The mind’s deep defenses block that entire notion on the grounds that the fear and pain are too immense to be handled by the conscious mind and would destroy it.

But I want to heal. I need to heal. So something has to be done.

I want to hold that sad little boy close and stroke his forehead and give him all the love and warmth and acceptance and recognition his long cold childhood denied him.

He’s suffered so much and been so very cold and lonely and through it all he kept it all to himself and just kept soldiering on no matter what.

He deserved so much better out of life than his icebox upbringing.

It wasn’t just the world’s fault, though. When he was raped, an invisible wall went up between him and the world and that wall blocked the sun most of the time and did not let the feelings in, good or bad.

Very little got through that wall. He was locked away in his own little world of media consumption, where everything was safely locked behind the glass of the television screen or the computer monitor, or sealed within the pages of a book.

I don’t think this wall was impossible to breach. But it would have taken someone pretty special. Someone of great warmth and compassion could have melted that icy wall and given that little boy a reason to believe there was something in this world worth opening his little heart for.

But they would have to be tough and persistent too because looking after him could be quite the wild ride given how you never knew what he was going to say.

And of course, it would help if they are pretty smart too. That’s not strictly necessary, though, as the things he needs have nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the deep animal language our souls speak to each other.

You don’t have to understand a child to love them.

You just have to be strong enough to hang in there and love them no matter what.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some of it quite old school.

My technology and I are not getting along right now.

My monitor still has that vivid vertical black line on or in it. It’s freaky because not only does it look like a real defect of some sort, it goes all the way from top to bottom just like a real scratch or whatever would do.

So I have to run my thumb over it now and then to remind myself that there is nothing actually there, at least on the outside.

Plus, I have looked it up, and it’s a known issue with some LCD monitors. Tends to have to do with a flaw in the connection with the computer.

Looking into that next.

And my tablet is out of commission. Grr. It’s out of juice and when I try to plug it in to recharge, it beeps and tells me there is moisture in the USB port and refuses to charge for me until I fix it.

Well I have done everything they suggest to fix it and it’s still effing there. Denying me.

The one thing I haven’t tried is seeing if a new charging cable will do the trick. But not for lack of trying.

I bought a new cable from 7-11, and after falsely believing it to have the wrong size USB connectors – had to physically compare it with the old cable to realize I was wrong – I was all set to give it a try.

Only to end up in the Chinese Hell Of Not Being Able To Fit The Connector In The Port For Some Reason.

Can’t make the old one click in their either, so I know the fault lies not with the new cable but with myself.

I will have to calm myself down as much as possible before I try again, and go into it knowing I have to take it slow and be patient and not let it frustrate me.

Ya know I really am rather high strung.

Finally, my phone died. My regular, old school, land line phone. Only the top row of keys works when pressed. So I can receive calls but I can’t make them.

I mean, I don’t even know anyone in Orlando.

So now I need a new land line phone. Luckily, they still sell them. They have plenty to choose from on Amazon. Phew!

Guess I was feeling some middle aged paranoia that I had been obsoleted.

I’m just going to get a cheap cordless. I want a cordless so that if I am waiting for a delivery, I can lay down in bed while I wait if I so choose.

My current phone’s cord doesn’t reach.

I will not be sad to see that old thing go. I’ve had it for 24 years and it’s been a pain in the ass because of how easily the handset ends up off the hook the whole time.

Still, it did last me 24 years, so it’s not all bad. It at least hung in there so it could continue to annoy me for all that time.

I am also shopping for a clock. How old school is that? I want one so that I have a way to tell time even when I am playing a full screen video game or lying in bed.

The only problem with that is that I am a fussy bitch and I don’t like any of the ones I have seen on Amazon so far.

I am probably going to get a digital clock just to cut the goddamned Gordian knot.

More after the break.

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The lonely warrior

Yesterday, I talked about fighting depression alone, and I want to pick up from there.

One thing that always cuts me to the quick when I am trying to research things that might help with my depression is when they talk about how important it is to have a really good support network.

You know, a group of people you can count on for support. People who will be there for you no matter what. People who understand you and your illness. People you can go to when you need somebody to talk to when you are feeling down.

When I read about that, the coldness and bitterness rise in me as I rue the life that has never given me those kinds of people.

But that’s not true. I have Joe and Julian. And they’re awesome.

If I still feel like I am always fighting my illness alone, the problem, once more, lies in me. There are people who could help me if I could let them in.

The problem is, I don’t really believe that.

Deep down, I don’t think anyone can help me. Not even my therapist, though he tries.

But I know that no good can come of my truly opening up to the people because then I would have to subject them to all the bitter rage and toxic hostility that lurks just below the surface of my cute and fluffy exterior.

And they can’t handle that. Nobody can. Even my therapist was left terrified and bewildered by the “real me” (one of them, anyway) so what chance do people like Joe and Julian stand?

Nobody can handle me. Nobody has ever been able to handle me, except maybe my babysitter Betty. As a result, I have been, in essence, unregulated for my whole life.

And it’s about a lot more than just intellect. Lots of very smart kids nevertheless are subject to adult control and guidance. My siblings, for instance.

But not I. I could not be controlled. So I basically raised myself.

And kids make lousy parents.

I was not just way too smart for my own good. I was rebellious and defiant and as independent as all get out. I was clever, stubborn, and had great force of personality.

And I never once thought the adults in my life were wiser or smarter than I. They were not. They were, in fact, largely full of shit.

Like I said yesterday, they and I were both lucky that my defiance is situational, not habitual. As long as I am content, I am compliant. And I am not hard to keep happy.

Looking back, I can see that if it wasn’t for this equanimity I would have been absolutely impossible to deal with and quite possibly ended up expelled.

Because then I would have made it my hobby to mess with the teachers and the system purely for my own amusement. And as a way to illustrate their hypocrisy and weakness.

Bad things happen to kids like that. Nobody wants The Joker in their school.

But there was probably a happy medium between passivity and sociopathy. Some way I could have protested being bored in the classroom and bullied in the schoolyard that would have gotten my point across without too much mayhem.

Too bad I was so passive and weak.

Even back then, I was in survival mode.

But can you blame me?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.