Today, I decided to do music.

And baby animals, but that was only to give people something to watch while they listened to the music, and, of course, a blatant attempt to pander to my audience by co-opting cuteness for my own fell purposes.

Says so right in the description of the video.

I even had a plan of sorts. I reserved the hours between 3 PM and 5 PM for composing the music and the hour between 5 PM and 6 PM for turning the music into a video.

A fair chunk of my time was spent figuring out the exact amount of time to set for the pauses on the pictures so that it would sync with the music.

It was 4 minutes 50 seconds, in case you were wondering. I just had to make them sync up. I hate things that don’t sync. And, like any comedy type nerd, I am obsessed with timing.

The song itself is… meh. Good pieces but not that hot as a whole. The middle bit with all the instruments going at once is way too cacophonous. Too much going on! And I wish I had taken the time to choose the instruments more carefully instead of just grabbing the first one I came across that sounded cool. Cool ingredients do not necessary lead to a cool final product.

But what the hell, it’s my first new composition since 2008 and I was rusty as hell. I barely remembered how to use FruityLoops at first. Luckily, it all started coming back to me once I was in it.

The next one will be better. And that funky bassline is simply too awesome to waste. It will probably pop up again somewhere else some day.

Found out today that I am going to have to make my own way to therapy tomorrow. Joe is working until 4, and the appointment is at 4:15, so…. not gonna happen. He can drive me back but he can’t drive me there.

So once more, I am faced with the question : cab, or bus?

Cab is freaking expensive. It was $25+ last time. And I really don’t have it to spare. I have my leftover GST cheque money but there is no way I am going to dip into that in order to take a cab, so I guess it’s the bus for me.

I have just barely enough money left for that. The $80 of leftover GST money is going to go onto my prepaid credit card, and I will use said cash to buy myself something nice.

Something permanent and useful. Maybe some sort of computer upgrade. I don’t know.

It’s been too long without a link. Here. here’s a picture of furry band practice.

So I am slowly getting together the gumption to do the bus by myself. This will be my first time taking the bus TO my therapist’s office. Theoretically, all I have to do to get there is retrace the steps I take to get home from there.

But in practice, I have a long history of getting lost in ridiculous situations where normal people would never get lost in a million years. Plus, you know, social anxiety.

I think I will attempt to freak myself out about it beforehand and see if I can get it out of my system under controlled circumstances. The experiment is not without risk, but the potential benefits are of sufficient value that I am willing to take the chance that I will just succeed in freaking myself out permanently about it.

So, you know…. caution is indicated.

It’s kind of like when people in charge of alpine safety use dynamite to deliberately cause an avalanche when they are there to redirect it away from populated areas, rather than try to deal with it when it finally decides to happen on its own.

Or when forestry people stage a controlled burn to clear out potentially dangerous dry areas and prevent out of control forest fires later on.

In both cases, there’s the real possibility of causing the thing you are trying to prevent and having the whole thing backfire.

But that’s a risk they are willing to take in order to make things safer for the future. I suppose if it did go wrong, they could tell themselves that it was going to happen anyhow so, technically, they didn’t actually make things any worse.

But I remember hearing about a case where a massive forest fire, the kind that wrecks homes and puts people’s lives in danger, that started out as a “controlled burn”, and I can only imagine that heads must have rolled over that.

And imagine the panic you would feel when your controlled burn turns into distinctly uncontrolled inferno.

I seem to recall that it came down to one dude who had made the call to do a controlled burn even though it was the height of forest fire season and so deliberately starting a fire seemed like madness.

I can only assume he thought he would be a big hero by preventing the forest fire everyone was afraid of by making the bold choice to do something nobody else would have the balls to do.

But all it took was one little ember escaping from the “controlled” area to the rest of the tinder dry forest and guess what? Fortune favours the bold, not the stupid.

So yeah. Gonna try the controlled burn method of coping with anxiety. Just lay in bed, close my eyes, and visualize the bus trip and everything that might be scary or might go wrong.

Honestly, usually these days my social anxiety is not a huge burden. I don’t feel anxious when I go to Shopper’s Drug Mart or Safeway. I don’t feel anxious at the therapist’s office, and when I first went there I was freaking the hell out.

I feel a little anxious at my GP’s office. Probably due to being around a bunch of sick people. Tends to make the atmosphere rather tense.

Well that’s enough blather for today. Seeya tomorrow folks!