I am waiting for the bus to take me to my last Creative Writing : New Forms And Media class.

I will miss it. I know I bitched and grumbled about the assignments from time to time, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun.

(—)

I’m in class now. There’s donuts. No fair, world! I was so good today at 7-11. Did not buy a single donut or cookie or anything. I was determined to be a good boy at least until Sunday, and I had already been good since Wednesday. I have gotten way too lax about eating the bad stuff and I was determined to “dry out”, as the alcoholics would say, and give my body a chance to at least work on any sugar overload before I went and ate the bad stuff again.

But then you had to go plop a tray of donuts in front of me. I’m not made of stone!

That was a really good cruller, too. Dammit.

(—)

Home now. Class ended at 7ish for us eager beavers who already had our final projects done.

You know… this ol’ thang.

Still not totally happy with it, but whatever.

I thought about sticking around and doing my blogging from the lab for a change. Get one last chance to hang out with my classmates. Then again, if I left early, I might be able to take the bus when it was running on a normal schedule instead of dumping me off at the Skytrain terminal and making me walk home those last two blocks. Like an animal.

And that way, I wouldn’t have to pay for a cab.

But then I thought, but what if it isn’t on the usual schedule, and I end up getting dropped off at the terminal. Then what? I can’t walk two blocks with my messed up knee.

Which pisses me off, because it’s a lovely night tonight (despite the weatherman’s dire warnings) and if it wasn’t for my bum knee, I would have been quite happy to walk those two blocks. It would have been a pleasant stroll on a lovely fall evening.

Heck, I might have even walked all the way home.

But with my knee hurting and worrying the heck out out of me, I am minimizing the steps I take. And that really pisses me off because I have finally gotten myself to a place where I am somewhat fit and could take more activity, and now I have to act like I did before I ever went back to school.

That fucking sucks.

So I ended up taking a cab home. The driver was super old. Not something I would normally note, but apparently he thought “just past Cook and Cooney” meant “turn left onto Cook”, despite my having told him my address was 6611 Cooney.

So when we turned onto Cook, I was rather surprised.

He was good enough to turn off the meter at that point, anyhow.

I think I am getting better at asserting myself. When he made the mistake, I said “No, we’ve gone the wrong way” in a firm but not aggressive tone that expressed my annoyance without making it some big deal.

That’s my model for how to handle situations like that, I think. There’s a lot of room between not expressing anger ever and dumping it on people like my Dad did.

I think I even managed to put some iron in my voice and employ a leadership tone, two things I have always wanted to be able to do. Turns out the missing ingredient was irritation.

I wasn’t sarcastic or angry or even loud. I just spoke in bold with periods.

“No. We’ve turned the wrong way. You’ll have to turn back. Turn left onto Cooney and stop at the first large apartment building on the right. ”

I suppose if you had a smoldering-rage abusive parent, that might come across as aggressive. But I think I struck the right chord.

And who knows, maybe I have found my Leadership Voice. I have, in the past, found it hard to believe that anyone would do something just because I told them to do it. That has, shall we say, hampered my leadership potential. Well, that and an aversion to responsibility.

But now that I am become less of a depressed lazy slagpile of a person, I am warming up to the idea that my role in life is to lead, organize, and administrate. That’s the next phase for me. I might not get there anywhere soon because I still have a lot of getting over myself to do, but I feel like my next evolution is to become the sort of person who gets things done. Who makes things happen.

Meanwhile, I am going to do my best to stay busy during the Winter Break. I have already decided that, come what may, I am going to get dressed exactly like I was going to go out every day. Getting dressed has a magical effect on me, turning me from a half-asleep unfocused glob of person into a focused, awake, ready to take on the world person.

My therapist suggested that I also try to get out of the house every day, and he has a point. Right now, I leave the house 6 days out of 7, and that’s very good for me. It would be a shame to lose that. So I am going to try to keep leaving the house, even if it’s just to get a bus to Lansdowne or something.

But what of my busted knee? Well, I came to the decision that I am going to start using my cane again. I have neglected to do so before now because it’s awkward and irritating and another thing to lose.

And it attracts sympathetic attention, which is sort of nice, but makes me feel feeble.

But I was in serious pain after (and while) coming down the stairs outside Kwantlen, and if my knee is to get better, I will have to take the burden off it some.

But then again, maybe I should stay ioff it altogether. Which would mean returning to being a slag.

I am in a weird position in life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.