Like I said on Facebook, Easter has very little to offer a diabetic atheist. ^[1]

Especially one with no family near him. Once you take away God and sugar, Easter is pretty much all about the family, and mine are far, far away.

As in, the closest one lives in Western Quebec.

So Easter is a dull thud of a nonevent to me, just like Xmas. It’s pretty much like every other Sunday. Only with the knowledge that millions of people worldwide are having fun and you’re not.

Not that I’m bitter.

In face, for me, Easter has been a nuisance. Remember how I told you that I was going to go get my non-psychoactive meds today? Well duh, today is “Easter Monday”^[2] so my pharmacy was still not open, and so I will have to go tomorrow.

What kind of a pharmacy has worse hours than a bank? Fuck.

I might wait till Wednesday, so I can do the whole White Spot thing too. I like the idea of making a trip to White Spot a Wednesday tradition with me. It would give me a reason to get out of the apartment on my own at least once a week^[3] and I can bear the expense fairly easily.

After all, I’m no longer shelling out for baking ingredients all the time.

And who knows, maybe the staff will get to know me and I will have an opportunity to not get freaked out by that.

Once, long ago, I talked on this blog about the experience I had in my previous fave White Spot, the one on 3 Road and Ackroyd. I lived in the neighborhood and a meal at that White Spot was a favorite treat of mine, so I was in there fairly often.

All was well until one day, the manager of the joint decided to sit down opposite and say “Hey, I know you! You’re in here all the time! How are you?”

This is a perfect example of how something that is actually quite positive and good (restaurants getting to know their regulars) becomes incredibly traumatic.

Because when he did that, I smiled and was polite, but inside I was freaking the fuck out.

Suddenly, the cozy cloak of impersonality and anonymity that keeps my social anxiety in check when I am in public was yanked away and I was lain bare by this totally well intentioned and in no way culpable man.

It’s not his fault that what works with most people does not work with me. I’m the one with the problem, not him. Were I saner, I would really appreciate that kind of thing. But at the time, I most definitely was NOT.

The whole experience shook me up so badly that I actively avoided that White Spot for months. And the first time I went back, I was bristling with paranoia and anxiety like a frightened cat.

That is what life with mental illness is like, folks. Simple things that would roll off the back of a sane person are enormous, shattering traumas (traumae?) because our brains don’t work right and our mental defenses are crap.

Hopefully, if it happens again this time, I will ready and be able to handle the surge of anxiety better and be able to wrestle it down or even, if I am feeling especially sane that day, I might even be able to roll with it and turn it into a genuinely positive thing, as opposed to a thing I pretend is positive because I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings about something that is not their fault.

It’s funny what we do to keep our social masks intact, isn’t it? Mine’s never been all that good. The real me is easily seen through the eye holes and the real me is impossibly weird to most people.

Like I have said, that is the secret heart of my social anxiety : that moment when I am trying to connect with someone, which is something I desperately want to do, but I can see in their eyes that look of incomprehension and withdrawal, and that just crushes me every time.

I am just too different to relate, I guess. I want to, I really do. But I am just plain not on their frequency.

So anyhow, Easter has been nothing but annoying to me. Last night, I was all ready to do my post Sunday dinner with Le Gang shopping when Felicity and I discovered that the supermarkets had closed early for Easter Sunday.

Instead, we had to go to 7-11, where I get way less for my money, and my carefully thought out plan was put into jeopardy. I thought I had it all worked out. I had $45 left in this week’s budget, and so I thought “$25 for dinner at Denny’s and $20 for my usual supplies from Sav-On. ”

At save on, $20 is plenty, mostly because my pop costs half as much there as it does at 7-11. But no, Easter fucked things up, and I ended up going a whole $1.50 over budget.

And didn’t get as much pop as I usually get. I will run out Wednesday.

So yeah. Fuck Easter. Having been raised atheist before converting to agnosticism, it was never a super huge deal for me anyhow. Might as well be called Spring Candy Day as far as I was concerned.

I know this makes me the Easter equivalent of a Grinch, but I don’t give a shit.

Fuck Easter, man. Fuck it in its fluffy bunny ass.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.