No, it’s not a creamy good chip dip with mood stabilizers in it. I have just been feeling a little down today.

Don’t know why, although I could, of course, theorize. I am growing frustrated with the petty details of getting my freaking BCID.

The website for my home province of Prince Edward Island has a handy dandy form you can fill out and submit online in order to order a copy of your birth certificate.

Which would be faboo, but it just plain will not recognize me as the person who has the right to said document. I filled out the form flawlessly, and it still says no. I must have tried ten different variations of my name and my parents’ names last night and it just won’t recognize me.

That is both frustrating to my goals and upsetting in general. This whole ID business is really messing with my admittedly somewhat fragile sense of self. Not being recognized or validated for who I am is kind of a thing with me, and having the website from my home province refuse to recognize me as the Island boy that I am just ups the number of provinces that don’t recognize me to two.

I can’t imagine what I was doing wrong. And to compound the frustration, the lady in charge (or at least the one that answers phones and replies to emails) Cindy was no fucking help at all. I poured my soul out to her in an email, and her reply was “Gee, that’s weird. ” Same thing on the phone. I will be forced to email the PDF of the requisite form to Felicity so she can print it out, then fill it out, then get it scanned so I can email it back to her.

Or fax it back. Did you know there’s still fax machines? True story.

Admittedly, dealing with Cindy also brought back painful memories of just how fucking useless people back home can be. That quaint informality and friendliness that people from Away love so much comes at a price, and a big part of that price is people just not really caring about their jobs.

At least, not enough to focus and be alert and ready to spring into action. The whole Island is draped with a very soft, very thick blanket of sleepiness, and if something requires a greater state of awakeness than that, it just does not happen. Nothing will get an Islander to wake up more than they usually have to. It has been a frustration for me all my life and now it is really coming to a head with this thing with Cindy.

And I know it would be no use to get mad at her. It wouldn’t make her any more likely to be of help to me. It just reminds me, forcibly, of why I am so glad I got the hell off the Island and escaped to places where at least some people are fully awake on occasion.

The other annoyance dragging me down is the CareCard thing.

The good news is that I was successfully able to order a new CareCard over the phone today, so yay that.

The bad news is it won’t arrive for 3 to 4 weeks.

I mean, what the fuck? Why the hell does it take that long? The nice fellow on the phone said that it used to be faster, but now it goes through ICBC and their card printing factor, so tough freaking luck.

I never dreamed that it would be this complicated just to get identified. It’s always the step you think will be the easiest that blossoms into a million complications, isn’t it? Typical.

Admittedly, this is partly that particularly male frustration pattern where it’s not just about solving the problem, it’s about make the thing do what it is supposed to do, otherwise the thing wins.

Don’t laugh, ladies. This is the sort of thing that drives the male mind. We get in dominance battles with inanimate objects, and feel a thrill of victory and glory when we make the damned thing do what we wanted it to do and what it is supposed to do. Our minds really work that way.

So in my case, I want the fucking online form to WORK. I want it to accept me as who I am. Printing out the boring old paper version feels like defeat. I would be much happier if I just found a way to make the online version accept me.

Because I exist, god dammit. I did a risky thing today and decided to Google myself and try to find traces of my existence. For example, I tried to see if there was any record of my work with the UPEI Theater Society. I figured if I got a mention somewhere, I could send the link to VFS as further proof of my creative powers.

But alas, no. They have record of my production of The Real Inspector Hound…. but without my name attached. The records only state what plays the theater society produced. It doesn’t list a single freaking name attached to the productions.

And the play I actually wrote, directed, produced, and starred in, What’s On, is not even mentioned at all.

So in that case, I gambled and lost.

Holy SHIT, life just keeps getting more complicated. I just got a phone call from my doctor’s office. The good news is that I finally have a appointment with a rheumatologist to see what is up with my knee.

The bad news is that I have to both call tomorrow morning to confirm the appointment AND go all the way to my GP’S office to pick up some form to fill out AND go all the way into Vancouver for the freaking appointment AND bring all my medications with me.

Fucking specialists! So next Monday, I got this whole adventure to go on.

It’s like I opened a Pandora’s Box full of complications.

Life is just too damned hard sometimes.

Oh well, talk to you again tomorrow folks!