It is grey and raining hard out right now, and that seems to have infected my mood with similar gloom. I feel achy and irritable and bored. And sleepy, even though I slept between 9 am and 2 pm already. Perhaps I am heading into one of my hyper sleepy periods. I hope not.

It would be most inconvenient to have a Big Nap Attack right now, because I have plans for today. First to go to this month’s BCSFA meeting, then to entertain my friend William afterwards. He will be at the meeting too, and will come back here to Nerdvana with us afterwards.

At least, that is the plan. Right now, I kind of feel like just crawling into bed and lapsing into a light coma for as while. Of course, I also kind of feel like stomping around in a circle while screaming, so you can’t take these transient whims too seriously.

There would probably be a primitive bonfire in the middle of the circle. I am not sure. I am new to this whole Maurice Sendak vibe.

And to just doing what I feel like doing in general, really. Pop culture spouts a lot of “follow your heart” garbage, and for all I know that might honestly be the best way to approach long time life planning, but in terms of what to do in the next five minutes, I am here to tell ya it just plain is not that easy. My hive is alive on overdrive pretty much all the time, and if I tried to follow every urge and impulse my mental megaplex puts out, the only question would be whether I died of exhaustion before they dragged me off to the loonie bin, or after.

Or at least, that is how it seems to me right now. Perhaps people who follow their whims all the time thereby discharge a lot of their excess impulses and so their mental vestibule is not clogged with a long long line of impulses who got checked at the door by the doormen of internal censorship.

I am certainly open to the idea that my life is just not working out for me how it is, and I would be well served by considering other ways to go about things.

I am still pondering trying to make the move to permanent diability status. I think the fact that I have been on “short term” disability for over a decade alone should be a broad enough hint to the System that I am not going to be getting a whole lot better any time soon.

If i succeeded in getting my status “upgraded”, I would get around $100/month more in cashola, which could help make life a whole lot easier for me, plus I would be able to get that golden ticket known as the Disability Transit Pass, which gives you unlimited travel on the bus and Skytrain for the whole year for like eighty bucks or so.

With something like that, it would be a lot easier to become a more active and outgoing person. I could wander the GVRD at will, attending various events and meeting new people and who knows, maybe actually finding something useful or at least interesting to do with my so called life.

In order to get the ball rolling, I apparently have to call up my social assistance office and make an appointment with my social worker and she (or he, but honestly, probably she) will do it all on the computer or some such thing.

I guess this is the paperless future, and I am all for that, honestly, especially if it saves me the humiliation of having to fill out a massive form and then tote that around to various agencies and beg them to fill out huge portions of it as well.

Doctors do not want to fill out forms for patients. They don’t like paperwork period. That is what secretaries and receptionists are for, after all. They get real grumpy when you turn from a patient for whom conversation and a hastily jotted prescriptions are enough into one that actually makes them have to sit down and do grunt work.

And when you are a shy and timid person who has a tendency to sort of fold in the face of authority anyhow, facing a grumpy doctor can be a major deal breaker right off the start.

But I have this horrible feeling that what will happen is that I will make the appointment, go see my worker, she will ask a bunch of questions and type a whole whack of stuff into the computer, and everything will seem golden…. until she presses “Print”, then hands me the massive printout and tells me to go get THAT filled out by various agencies. Psych!

Paperless future my ass. That will only happen when all the doctors use computers too, and have you seen how old most of them are? Not going to happen.

Then again, my doctor is pretty young, and seems at least familiar with the existence of those “calm pew tar” thingies, so perhaps it will not be an issue.

I will try to work up the energy to make the phone call on Tuesday. (Tomorrow is a stat holiday here in Canada, Victoria Day, when we all get together and watch Victor Victoria). And when I say “the energy” I really mean “the nerve”.

Being timid really makes life more complicated in so many, many ways.

And yet, in different circumstances, I am so bold as to be downright brassy. I guess everybody has their areas of confidence and of lack of confidence. Put me in an argument, or in a situation where I am called upon to stand up for a friend, and you will see a very NOT timid side of me emerge.

In the right circumstances, I fight like a fire breathing dragon, ready to burn down anything that gets in my way in my fight for what is right.

I just wish I could do that for myself.