Feeling kinda bleh today.

Good day to just throw some links at y’all whilst I diarize.

Like check out this extremely clever bit.

I love this kind of meta-comedy. For one, the skit starts with an excellent bit of misdirection. You have no idea what the joke will be because you accept subtitles as a natural thing when talking to brown people, so you don’t even consciously notice them.

So to then have them become central to the bit is brilliant. And then to have a character get mad because he is subtitled and feel it is an insult to the quality of his English is doubly brilliant.

All in all a genius bit.

So yeah, today I have been feeling crappy. But then again, it’s the afternoon. I always feel like crap in the afternoons. And today, I have to do both parts of my day’s labours in the afternoon because tonight I will be going to the monthly BCSFA meeting.

At least, that’s what I should do. I honestly do not feel like it. I am tempted to just skip it and stay in and rest and stuff so I can be bright and perky when I hang out with the gang watching videos tonight. I just do not feel like pulling myself together to go out and be social today. I want to fall apart instead, like I usually do when I feel down. Just melt into a puddle of squishy good like I am Odo in his bucket, and regenerate.

Later, when I have my strength back, I can pull myself together and form a coherent shape and stick with it for a while. But right now, I just feel so dissolute and dissolved that just having it together enough to type these words to you wonderful people makes me feel like I am balancing a nail on my nose.

But I think I will go. I will go specifically because it will be difficult to do so. I am sick and fucking tired of the path of least resistance. I need to start building some strength of character. Put some muscles on my wimpy will and straight out this spineless soul of mine.

Sure, remaining formless maximizes options and minimizes commitment. If your resting state is shapelessness, then you can always take on whatever shape is needed at the time and can never, ever, be caught in the wrong shape at the wrong time, which somehow seems like the worst thing in the world.

Like if that happened, part of me will screech “See! You should have stayed formless, you idiot! Then you could have taken the shape you need instead of being stuck in the wrong one!”.

But maybe true adaptability means being able to handle things whatever shape you’re in.

And the thing about having formlessness as your default state is that it means that to actually take a useful shape requires energy, and maintaining that shape requires a constant input of energy. And that means you have this drain on you all the time you have to keep your shit together, and that limits how long you can do it and how stable any given shape can be.

Whereas with some investment in permanent structure and strength, you will have a shape even when you have no energy. Sure, you might be a little less adaptable, and it definitely means deciding on a shape and committing to it, which is very very hard for liquid types like myself.

So many possibilities… how can you possibly pick one? I saw one of those “find your passion and follow it” speeches recently via TED, and it all sounds very good and is no doubt true. I do feel like I have hidden behind excuses and cowardice for a long time. I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of, and amazing talents and abilities, so in theory there is nothing stopping me from just going out into the world to stake my claim and leave my mark on the world.

Nothing except abject terror, that is. The excuses and lies and self-delusions might be holding me back, but they are also my shelter from a world I feel to be cold and hard and unfeeling precisely because I have protected myself from it so effectively for so long.

I am a very old caterpillar.

Chief amongst these excuses, and the bigger one that I can’t seem to imagine how to overcome, is that issue of selection and commitment.

I have so many talents, so many interests, so many passions…. I can never choose. Having to choose one and commit to it truly feel like Sophie’s Choice to me, and like Sophia’s Choice, not choosing is easier, and involves less guilt, but leads to a far worse result.

And I’m all about outcomes. Aren’t I?

So I must dream into being some form of compromise that keeps my options as open as possible while also letting me actually go out there and actively explore some of them, and accept that said exploration will necessarily involve the possibility of some options being chosen and some discarded.

Time to man up and become a firmer, stronger species of goo.

Oh, and today’s vid is another piece of music.

I feel kinda bleh about that, too. I get the feeling that I will have to keep hammering away at the music thang for a while before I can make stuff that actually satisfies me.

Oh, and speaking as I was many words ago of TED, I found an amazing website via a TEDx talk by its creator.

It’s called DuoLingo, and it offers you high quality language training absolutely free. And not only that, by just using the website to learn to speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, you are also helping to translate Web pages from English into those languages.

So I am totally going to be using it to learn French. I started at the beginning, even though I do remember some of the French I learned over twelve damned years of taking it in school, because I figure I need to learn it all again if I am going to develop any sort of fluency.

And man, is it a pain in the ass dealing with gendered language again. Argh.

Oh well. Talk to you tomorrow, folks!