Once again, I am somewhat depressed on Saturday. But I think I know why.

For one, I’ve been hanging out naked, something I keep telling myself I will never do again, but always seems to happen around now. My excuse this time was that I had no clean laundry to put on, but I still have a pair of red sweatpants kicking around here somewhere that a perfect for Laundry Day attire. So that dog don’t hunt.

And the thing is, I know from my experience living in a nudist-ish household in the past that when I am going nudist, I end up in this sort of soft squishy depressed mindset where I just plain can’t get going.

One of the many things going to Kwantlen has done for me is give me a reason to get dressed every day. When I am dressed, I am more focused and alert and ready to face whatever comes. Naked, I am a depressed, bed-seeking, life-avoiding shut-in who wants to crawl down a hole and hide from the world.

And I don’t wanna be that guy any more. Fuck that guy. He’s a deeply unhappy person.

Part of me still wants to be there, though, and it will take a while before the desire to turn into a puddle and flow down the drain is gone from me completely. I am still in the process of convincing myself that it is okay to be out there in the world without ready access to my bed or other methods of comfort.

Indeed, going out to face the big bad world makes coming home to be cozy and relaxed a million times better. Which is why, I suppose, Saturdays are depressing to me. No daily thing to keep me focused and give me direction except for blogging, and blogging is not enough by itself.

I’d be lost without it though. If I didn’t even have blogging to keep me stitched together, I would end up in a very, very bad frame of mind. I just plain can’t imagine my life without this blog now. As long as I do my 1000 words a day, my thoughts and emotions have a regular way out. It’s not always the ones I thought I was going to be expressing, but it’s all stuff that needs to be expressed, so it’s all good.

So once more, I cherish and adore everyone who reads this blog. You help keep me sane.

I felt really great yesterday, and that’s not worth ignoring. I honestly think the key must have been hydration. I arrived at class with a 2L bottle of tap water, down that in like half an hour, then on break I refilled it, and drank THAT over the next two hours. That’s 4L of water!

So sure, I had to pee a lot yesterday and today. But if it puts me in that good of a mood, it’s worth it a thousand times over.

When I go back to class on Monday, it will be with plenty of water. Maybe I have been nursing a bad case of hypo-dehydration for a long time, and it took actually listening to my body and obeying my thirst to realize it.

Now I want to go back in time and take those “OBEY YOUR THIRST” 7up ads and just remove the 7up part of them. Obey your thirst in general, folks. Drink as much water as it demands. Drink till your body tells you to stop. And don’t go into it with any preconceptions as to how much that will be, either.

As with me, it could turn out to be one heck of a lot. Especially the first time.

I shouldn’t be surprised I ended up skirting dehydration. I went like five days without diabetes meds, and that led to a heck of a lot of urination. Enough so that it kept me from getting good sleep!

I hate it when that happens.

And ya know, if output outstrips input, you end up with a serious deficit. No wonder I needed all that water. Makes me wonder if I could still be in deficit.

This clearly warrants further experimentation. Time to drink more water!

Another thing I am working on : letting go of unnecessary expectations. For example, I know that yesterday I had big big plans for today. And I know that the odds are that blogging is all I will accomplish for today.

And that is fine. When it comes to things I am doing on my own, with no extrinsic motivation, I have to tread a very fine line between not punishing myself and not giving up on myself. I want to be able to fill my time when I feel bored and depressed, but I don’t want that to turn into something dark and ugly that my depression can use to pummel and punish me.

I want to nurture the desire for productive labor, not punish it!

I do have homework I could work on. But it involves reading this interminably long and impenetrably dense free verse poem and I am going to have to work my way up to that because it is nonfun.

However, once I do read it and select which “hour” of it (cor, what a giveaway) I like most/hate least, I get to write a poem in response to it, and I know I will enjoy that.

That’s the thing about being a writer. While every good writer has to be a good reader first, that does not mean we want to read other people’s writing. We still have our own tastes, after all, and while there will be some connection between what we like and what we write, it might not be an obvious one.

And that goes ten times over for poetry. So having to read all this dense BS that doesn’t seem to want to actually tell me anything directly is going to be a chore.

When it comes to poetry, I would much rather be writing it than reading it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.