I am getting worried about my feet. Walking shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

It’s because of my inability to find shoes that can survive me walking in them, I think. No matter what, the shoes quickly lose all semblance of arch support or any other support, and so it is like I am walking the mean streets of the GVRD in a very thin pair of slippers.

And that’s just plain bad for feet.

Plus I get a lot of weird pains and itches in my feet. And cramps. This suggests to me that they are in considerable distress. As you know, diabetic people tend to have foot issues. The disease interferes with blood circulation, and the blood vessels in your feet are particularly sensitive to that kind of thing, because they already have the tough job of keeping your blood flowing all through your feet when you basically standing on the arteries and veins.

And of course, for us type II diabetics, odds are we are morbidly obese, and that means we are putting way more weight on our feet than they are designed to bear. After all, when you get fatter, your feet don’t get bigger in order to compensate.

And to be honest, if my feet were big enough to spread the weight evenly like they are supposed to do, they would be the size of snowshoes.

Back when my life was sedentary to the point of me practically being an invalid, this issue didn’t come up a lot. I could get away with barely walking at all and almost never walking outside of the home. And part of me misses that…. but not really, because I know I was miserable back then and way happier now.

It’s just the kind of happiness that takes effort.

Trying to lead an effort-free life is quite poisonous to the mind and soul. Trust me, I know this all too well. Sure, I would like it if my life were easier. Who wouldn’t? But the key thing is that I am not going to use something being “too hard” or taking “too much effort” as an excuse to hide from the world any more.

Depression is made of excuses. Recovery delivers results.

Still, I ought to do something about my feet. My feet are still sore an hour after I take my shoes off after a day at school, sometimes more. And that is a very bad sign, methinks.

Speaking of school, getting the homework done this weekend. There was no grace period at all this term. Got homework in my very first class. Fine by me, gives me something to do besides sleep too much and play too much Fallout 4. And it’s all real writing, so I am happy about that. I am looking forward to having to produce more actual creative content, with rules and such. I want to stretch my abilities as a writer, but I know I damned well don’t have the self-discipline to make myself do it all alone.

So having the structured environment of school really helps. And after all, if I succeed in getting work in the TV industry, I will be expected to produce good pages quickly (TV is a madhouse!), and having to get homework done on time or it is worth nothing certainly trains one in that!

The most interesting, exciting, and terrifying bit of homework is having to come up with ten “desk jokes” for Sketch class. A “desk joke” is the sort of thing that talk show hosts do in their monologues and news parody shows do as fake news – the kind of joke that starts with a real news item, then ends with a snarky riff on it.

I have never written that kind of thing before. I am not really a “joke” type writer. I am not saying I can’t or won’t do it. I’m just saying that it will mean learning a whole new way of being funny, and that is going to take some serious effort.

When the time comes (probably tomorrow afternoon), I am going to sit down with my Facebook feed, write riffs on every news story I find for which I can think of something, and hopefully learn by doing. I am confident that I can do it… I certainly know how to riff. It’s just a matter of focusing down on turning that into jokes.

Still, I will be happy when we are writing actual skits. I have over one thousand skit ideas on file. I am not worried about the sketch part of things.

Oh, and our sketch class teacher assures us that there’s always a huge demand for good desk joke writers, so it’s a very good skill to develop. And I believe her. After all, there’s a lot of talk shows and other types of news-reaction type shows out there, and they have to come up with a ton of jokes five days a week.

Not sure I would want to make a career out of that kind of work. It doesn’t seem like it would be very rewarding, artistically speaking. But it would pay the bills.

What else… did my monologue from the point of view of the protagonist of the feature film I will be writing done. I know the character very well, so it wasn’t hard to do. I might need to rewrite it some, though. Technically, the assignment just wanted me to write something explaining her and her situation in her own unique voice, and I totally did that, but I think I will delete a few details in order to make room for more character reveals.

I also have to write a one page dialogue for dialogue class. I already took a stab at it, but I don’t like the result, so I am going to try again.

That’s a big step for me. Normally I would send it in the moment it was done and forget all about it. But this time… I will rewrite.

So yay for me! I am growing up as a writer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.