Well that was seriously fucking depressing. I don’t know what to do with all the anger and humiliation and self-loathing I am feeling right now. I hope I can calm myself down.

Well, when it doubt, blog it out.

I just came back from what turned out to be a very brief Ideology and Politics class. Brief, because it was only when I got there that I realized that I had completely forgotten to do the assignment due today.

I told the prof, and she said that well, that was all we were working on today so I might as well go home. I even offered to help the “odd man out” by peer reviewing HIS assignment, but the prof seemed to think that poor dude was better off hoping someone else would show up late than getting help from me.

I’m telling you, I am liking her less and less. She was totally unsympathetic to me. That’s fair enough but the way she talks, it makes her sound sweet and kind and apparently, no, not really.

And while it is mostly my fault for spacing out on an important assignment, I do think she takes around eight percent of the blame for not putting assignments up on the Moodle site for the class. All my other courses post assignments to their course sites, and that means that the first thing I see when I log onto the system are links to the courses that have assignments due.

My fatal mistake was assuming that list was complete. In a sense, I was betrayed by technology. I looked at the site, saw I had nothing due today, and went on my merry way, completely forgetting that there was something that doesn’t show up there.

Well, it won’t happen again. I have added a “Homework” list to the notes I keep via Google Keep, and the moment I am assigned something, I will put it THERE, and THAT will be my Bible for what I have due and when.

All because one prof doesn’t like using Moodle. Fuck.

The worst part of this, the absolutely worst part of it, is that I spent time last night working on an assignment for Creative Writing that isn’t due till tomorrow night.

I could totally have done this What Democracy Means To Me bullshit instead. But I forgot all about it. I remembered it as recently as Monday afternoon, but between then, I slipped into thinking I could trust Moodle and that, in a sense, erased my memory of the damned thing.

Part of me really wants to just drop the class. That would not be the sensible adult thing to do, but I could do it. I am taking a full courseload, I could afford to cut one loose. And then I wouldn’t have to go to school on Mondays and Wednesdays at all. I could just stay home and….. do what, exactly?

That’s the catch. I really don’t want to add two more purpose free days to my week. Imagine how depressed I got Monday when that class was canceled due to the prof being sick (a class where I no doubt would have been reminded about the assignment) and then multiply that by two times the number of weeks left in the semester.

So no, that’s not really an option. I will show up Monday and resume learning. I have no other choice.

I am not at risk of self-harm now, but I was on the way home from my humiliation. The idea of throwing myself down the stone steps in front of Kwantlen flashed through my mind a couple times as I left. Not because I wanted to die or even that I was looking for pain or punishment.

Just for something that would cut through the pain I felt inside and maybe give me a kind of time-out where I was temporarily free of expectation to do stuff or cope with anything but getting well.

I mean, nobody expects a guy who “tripped” down the stairs to worry about missed assignments, right?

It’s sick that a part of my mind is always thinking like that. Not the self-harm part, the schemey part. But not just manipulative and calculating, but warped, self-destructive, and utterly without honor or shame.

I can’t help it. Cowardice plus intelligence equals deviousness. The evil thought are always there.

But I don’t act on them. I, obviously, did not throw myself down the stairs of Kwantlen Richmond. That would have been an entirely different kind of blog entry. But the fact that the thought and the urge flashed through my mind says a lot about why I never feel entirely safe from myself.

Maybe it’s an illusion my depression creates to protect itself, this suicidal/self-harm ideation. Maybe I could let go of my iron self control and ruthless self-suppression and nothing bad would happen except I would feel a million times better and look back at how I was before and wonder what all the fuss was about.

But that’s not a risk I can afford to take. And it knows that.

Luckily, I think this assignment was only worth 3 percent of my final grade. So not that big a deal in the overall picture. I will do the assignment and hand it in, partly because getting some marks for it is preferable to getting none, but mostly as a good faith effort to show the professor that I am taking it seriously and care about getting my work done.

And that I am not completely mentally incompetent, I suppose.

Absentmindedness is such a debilitating flaw. I am learning to work around it with notes and reminders and alarms and such, but I have been this way for my whole life and having it trip me up over and over again, no matter how hard I try to keep it together, really wears a fella down over time.

Oh well. Today’s tragedy is tomorrow’s memory and the future’s anecdote.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.