My first term at VFS is officially over, and I don’t have school again till Monday morning.

Showed up for school at 9 am. Went to the classroom. Nobody there. WTF? Turned out the one class I had today was actually in the afternoon. I got it wrong because while it said 1 to 4 pm on the schedule, it said it in the slot that normally has morning classes in it. So I am assigning at least half the blame to the staff members who made the schedule.

They’re the ones who made the mistake, dang it! And at least I wasn’t alone. There was one other student who made the same mistake. I felt like we were brothers in cluelessness.

This left me with a couple of problems. The first was being pissed off that I hauled my ass into school when I could have slept in. But I got over that fairly quickly.

The next was the problem of what to do with the next three hours of my time. Solution : I took a nap in the lounge. Can’t say I slept super well, but it was something. That killed an hour and a half. The rest of the time I read my book and mellowed out.

That got me to 11:30 am, when I got too hungry to concentrate and had to eat lunch. But of course, I didn’t pack a lunch. I didn’t think I would need one. Had my class been in the morning, I would have just eaten when I got home around 1 pm. But nope.

This issue was further complicated by the fact that I was (and still am) broke AF. I had $2.65 to my name, and that doesn’t get you lunch downtown, not even when that $4.95 for everything place is having 33 cent wing day.

I’m not that big on wings anyhow. Especially not the crappy kind they serve at bars. That default “buffalo” wing sauce tastes quite nasty to me.

So I ended up having to put some more Subway on the Education Fund credit card. Damn it. And just for the hell of it, I got a foot-long instead of my usual six inch, and that confirmed something I should have already known : there’s no point in spending the extra two or three bucks because I can’t finish a foot-long any more.

But at least I got to drink that watermelon juice again! Man that stuff is good. I wish I could get a gallon of it. Well, okay, maybe not a gallon…. as much as I love (LOVE!) watermelon, I would probably get tired of it before I finished a gallon.

A quart, maybe.

I was a bit nervous about class, because it was finally my turn to give the presentation at the beginning of the Script Structure class, one I worked on with my partner Ainslee (the Nova Scotian girl…. go Maritimes!), and while I don’t usually suffer from stage fright at all and I am great at public speaking, this was different. It was something where I was going to have to improvise a little, and that makes me nervous. After all, the presentation had only existed since last night, when Ainslee did the PowerPoint for it!

I did the writing.

But I needn’t have worried. Everything went fine. And it reminded me that I am a natural at that sort of thing. I would be so good at being an emcee for stuff. Or a game show host. I would rock that job.

Lately I have been pondering the question of fitting in. I want to fit in, I really do. But it’s not easy. I lack a lot of the deep social awareness, honed by years of social interaction with friends and such, that most people have by the time they leave elementary school.

As a result, I have grown into a very strange bird indeed. A lot of the circuitry that should have been dedicated to social development ended up getting used for other stuff, like all that abstract reasoning and creativity and deep thought I got going on, and those are the source of my powers.

And like any wizard, powers are all I have to offer the world. Without those, I am sort of pathetic.

So it’s a very complicated territory to navigate. Deep down, I want to be one of those people who can be totally at ease with anybody. That’s a noble goal, but probably not realistic, at least in the short and medium term. But it would be nice not to feel so awkward around people.

In order to achieve that, I think I would need lots and lots of experience with some fairly patient people who understand that a lot of what I say will be brain-crashingly strange to them and they will just have to wait for me to make sense again.

I need something like the social equivalent of a language immersion camp. Some place where I can get all the social exposure I need in order to spark that part of my brain that lets kids learn social skills at an early age, so I can acquire them on the deep native level that seems to be required.

I mean, I’m sensitive and somewhat charismatic, as well as witty and crazy freaking intelligent. Theoretically, I could be awesome. But first, I need to develop that little voice that tells me what will fit in people’s minds and what will not. Plus the willingness to listen to that voice and let it help me choose what to say more carefully.

There’s still a part of me that wants to say “Fuck you, I’m not dumbing what I say down for anyone! If they can’t handle it, that’s their problem!”

And that part of me will never totally go away. It will always stubbornly resist any sort of compromise to conformity and rebel against the notion of having to be like everyone else.

And there’s even a kind of admirable nobility to that kind of stance.

But I get so lonely sometimes.

And I want to come in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.