No idea what I want to talk about today, so let’s just check out where I am in life right now.

Let’s see. I am doing fairly well with the CPAP machine. Been through several waves of resistance to using it lately. These will get smaller over time if I just maintain firm pressure towards greater discipline.

Right now, I would say I am something like 70 percent compliant. In other words, I use my CPAP machine for around 70 percent of the time I am asleep.

One odd phenomenon has cropped up. I will sleep with the CPAP machine on, and wake up feeling rested, but only from the neck down, so to speak. My eyes are still tired and I feel a little lightheaded and dizzy.

My current working theory (of course I have a theory) is that while my lungs are happy with being CPAP’d, my face muscles are still adjusting to my sleeping with this thing (the CPAP mask) on my face.

Plus, there is no guarantee that the machine is curing my sleep apnea one hundred percent. According to the data I got from my last trip to the sleep store, I am still having four sleep apnea “events” per hour. That’s a whole lot better than the seventeen per hour I was having before the CPAP, but it’s still not a one hundred percent cure.

Then again, that was before the pressure increase. Maybe I’m down to three per hour now.

Anyhow, part of me is still resisting putting on the mask “just to sleep”. It seems absurd, at least to the more primitive parts of me, to strap on a plastic mask just to sleep, and that part of me resents it and tries to convince me to skip it “just this once”. And about thirty percent of the time, it does.

But my will is iron, and I will overcome this incarnation of The Jagoff. God, I hate that asshole.

What else…. well, I am still on track for Kwantlen, of course. I have made some progress towards finding funding. At the very least, there seems to be some federal money I can access. There’s $250 per month of study for disabled people, and there’s money for students from low income families, and well, I am my own family, more or less, and very low income.

$11K a year, folks. It’s not a lot.

Unfortunately, for the disability money, I am going to have to jump through hoops to prove I am disabled. Apparently, the fact that the BC government thinks I am disabled is not good enough for the Feds. And that will be a pain because it’s not something I can just fill out online. I will have to get a hard copy and get my therapist to fill it out. Which is a drag.

The real problem is that I can only tackle this stuff in occasional bursts of activity. Otherwise, I get too stressed. This, despite the fact that I know I can handle it, at least the parts that just involve filling out forms online.

I still have trouble dealing with reality.

Plus, all the Google fu required just to find this damned information really stresses me out. I am just not cut out for research. I get too frustrated when I can’t find what I want.

I have had this issue with frustration for my entire life. Like I have mentioned before, I got away with a lot of not doing what the other students had to do because I was so damned stubborn. I would get frustrated when trying to do anything like arts or crafts, and then I would refuse to keep trying, and I don’t need to tell you (but I will), that’s not a great approach to life.

Come to think of it, it was frustration, but it was also anxiety. I suppose they can be the same thing sometimes. I would be trying to do what everyone else was doing, but because of my motor-sensory issues, I would not be able to do the simplest part of it, and I would feel like a loser and an idiot and that everyone was staring at me and judging me.

That anxiety – the feeling that I just can’t work reality right – is with me to this day. I get very anxious when anything involving competently handling the physical comes up.

This is an enormous issue. I have done myself no favours by avoiding anything that involves using your hands for anything but typing and using the mouse. It’s one thing to be too clumsy for sports, but being too clumsy for life? Not good.

But that might just be my depression talking. That, and some very old tapes from my childhood. Realistically speaking, I am physically competent enough for a lot of stuff. I would do fine with office work of any sort. I am fully capable of manning a cash register or a copier. I am sure I could flip burgers and work french fry machine.

So the bizarre disconnect between my eyes and my hands is not nearly as debilitating as I sometimes feel like it is. It’s not like the ability to glue glitter to construction paper is in high demand. There are a lot of jobs I could do perfectly well, if I could actually get the job.

But that’s another issue.

So maybe I need to ease back on my feelings of incompetence. I am competent enough for modern life. Maybe I couldn’t do some manual labour jobs and I will never be a master of the visual arts, but I am already a master of words, so if I was good at drawing too, that just wouldn’t be fair, would it?

Not that I would turn it down if offered. If I could take a pill and become very good at drawing, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Because then I could write and draw comics!

And some of them wouldn’t even be porn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.