Yesterday was rad.

The first meeting of the revived (by me) FRED went well. It feels really good to be organizing something again. Actually, it doesn’t just feel good, it feels right. Like this is something I am supposed to be doing. Right now, my life plans don’t include an organizational career, but I might want to consider it.

Being the guy who brings it all together and makes it happen is awesome. It’s an act of creation, just like writing. Creating something out of nothing.

That’s what it is all about for someone like me.

Who know, once I have FRED 2.0 up and running, I might try something more ambitious.

I got to talk with Graeme about my story. See, R. Graeme Cameron has started a new ‘zine dedicated to giving promising unpublished author (like moi) their first professional sale. He asked me to send him some of my stuff, so I sent him a sampler of four of my short stories.

The story he choose was my Five Dimensional Roommate series. Groovy. Turns out he thought it needed a lot of editing to take out stuff he thinks is not necessary. Fair enough. He can do whatever he wants with it as long as my name is on it and I get paid.

So when his next ish comes out, I will be in it, and will get paid $20 for it. Might just frame the check.

Don’t know why I am so sleepy today.

Oh, I have to write down this dream I had. I dreamed that I was taking a really hard test about language in a classroom a lot like one of the classrooms in the elementary school I went to, Parkside Elementary back home in Summerside, though I am positive both students and teacher were adults.

And almost immediately, my test… disappeared. I looked and looked through all my papers (for some reason, there was a lot of other papers on my desk) and I found other things from the same class like graded homework and other handouts, but the two pieces of paper with the test on it were gone.

So now I am freaking out, thinking I am going to fail the test because it’s really hard and it was probably going to take the entire allotted time to completely so every second that goes by mean less of the test I will get to complete. Finally, tears in my eyes, I begged the teacher to let me take the test at some point after class, by myself, so I would have enough time.

They weren’t keen on the idea, and said I should take the test now, with everyone else. I asked “Well do you have another copy?”, because at first, it looked like they didn’t and I figured I would get out of my problem that way.

But they did, and I took it back to my desk, where it, of course, disappeared. So now my freaking out shifts into overdrive. The last thing I remember from my dream is sob-whimpering “Teacher… it happened again!”.

Teacher. Not professor. Interesting.

Not hard to interpret that one. I have already told you fantastic people about how Linguistics class is stressing me out. So a “super hard test about language” is a reality of my life.

And things going missing or getting lost is a very common theme in my dreams. It’s the curse of the absentminded. Subjectively, things really do go missing and get lost to us all the time.

So I am guessing that was a classic stress dream, like the ones I used to have where I was wandering the halls of my high school because I didn’t remember what class I was supposed to be in and I couldn’t remember the combination to my locker either.

The other cool thing that happened last night, after FRED, was that Felicity and I went to a Halloween-themed birthday party for a friend of hers named Cat.

It was awesome. A smallish group of freaky cool people who really went all out in setting up the house to be a goth fun house. We were there for around four hours, and my social anxiety was largely absent.

Plus there were cats! They had to be locked away in a room for the party because some people were allergic, but Felicity and I went to visit them (of course), and later I visited on my own.

There were two cats, both toms. There was Gizmo, who was very friendly and sociable, and Kitsune, who was very shy and mostly hid.

I did manage to get Kitsune to come close enough to sniff my hand, but that was it. If I had been able to sit and use my full cat-vibe powers, I probably could have gotten him to let me pet him. I have done the same with other very shy kitties.

It’s a matter of patience and putting out the right vibe.

When I was in there on my own, I pet Gizmo a bunch. It was lovely. I miss having kitties around to pet. He got all purry and rolled over on his back a few times. Awwww!

Mostly, I am proud that I made the decision to go to this party with Felicity and socialized with a bunch of people and nothing terrible, either real or internal, happened.

I didn’t get a lot of laughs, but I realized that I really should not judge social interactions that way. It wasn’t until last night that I even realized I had been doing it. I was treating social interaction like it was standup comedy, and that meant that if people didn’t laugh at my jokes, that meant I had bombed.

And that meant failure and rejection.

This was clearly not right. Life is not a comedy club. People can fail to laugh but still like you. It doesn’t meant you have failed.

Although I think it is that core neurosis that had led me to be the hilarious (ish) dude I am today.

All artists have something fundamentally wrong with them, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.