Dunno why I am so damned sleepy today.

I guess it’s just one of my sleepy days. And I wish I had the luxury to indulge it. But I have made plans to go see Pete’s Dragon with a friend (and reader of this blog), and that’s in two or three hours, so even when I am done blogging here I will not have all that much time for napping.

Ain’t that always the way?

Being quite sleepy, my powers of concentration are at ebb tide. I keep having to drag my mind back to the blogging. It’s so easy to get distracted.

Had a pleasant afternoon yesterday. It was Cheque Day, so I took the bus to my bank, cashed La Cheque, then treated myself to lunch at the nearby Boston Pizza. Normally, it would be the White Spot a little further away, but I felt like doing something different and I haven’t been to a Boston Pizza in ages.

I ordered something called a Bacon and Pepperoni Pizzaburger, expecting it to be a basic burger with pizza toppings. Instead, what I got was a burger patty wrapped in a pizza, basically. Like a burger shaped calzone. The cheese, pepperoni, and bacon were in the space between the burger and the pizza crust shell.

It was… interesting. It was significantly too hot to eat like a burger when it came to me, so I cut it in half with my table knife to encourage cooling. After a couple of minutes, it was merely hot, not scald your palate hot.

After that, I want to PriceSmart (formerly a Sav-On Foods, but they changed the name to fuck with the union) to pick up a few things, then walked home.

My feet did not hurt too much, which gives me hope that this time off has undone some of the damage done to my feet by all that walking to school from the Skytrain and back. It’s a sad thing to realize that a small amount of perfectly normal walking can really mess up your feet. I was supposed to make a doctor’s appointment with my GP to see about getting something seriously orthopedic for my poor flat feet this week, but oops, nope, didn’t happen.

I will have to work it into my school schedule somehow.

I’ve looked over the schedule for next term, and it looks like I will be taking six classes like last term. Fair enough. I am kind of curious as to what it is going to be like to workshop 20 pages of movie script a week from multiple students. The table reads will certainly be longer. Ditto for the feedback sheets. Plus there’s the TV spec script.

So yeah. Shit’s getting real, y’all.

Which is fine by me. I like writing. It’s a lot more work than my usual mode, but that’s a good thing. It drains me of those excess energies that fuel so much of the bad shit that goes on my head. Plus it’s good for me to push myself past my usual rather pathetically tiny limits. The true road to freedom from fear and ennui is to expanding your comfort zone and building confidence in your ability to handle things. It’s the opposite of the constant surrender of depression and despair.

It’s like the depressive is stuck in the “give up and run away to hide” mode of animal conflict. Two animals square off : one will win, and the other will surrender, at which point the winner’s attack ceases and the loser is permitted to run away to lick their wounds.

Now try to apply that to humans versus all sorts of conflicts and challenges of life, and you begin to see the futility of it all. Life, not being a person or even an animal, does not and cannot accept your surrender. Whatever you consider to be its attacks on you, it will not stop when you give up. It will not let you go. It’s like asking a tsunami to show mercy.

Surrender can be quite addictive, though. Like I have said before, there is a pleasure in giving in to your fears and quitting trying. Suddenly, the tension is gone, and that relief can be quite narcotic. But it’s like gnawing a limb off to get out of a trap. Sure, it works, but it costs you a lot and you would want to make absolutely sure there was no other option.

The adaptive solution is to learn to get a grip on yourself in these scary and tense situations so you can figure out a smarter solution to your problem. If you can pull that off, not only will you escape the situation with all your limbs intact (so to speak), you will have the memory of triumph to bolster your confidence in future conflicts.

I have been making a conscious effort lately to identify the “good” choice and the “bad” choice in various situations, and then make the “good” one. By good, I mean healthy and adaptive. Doing something when I don’t feel like it but I know it will be the healthier choice for me is the “good” direction. Giving in and giving up and saying “fuck it” is the “bad” direction.

And even though the “bad” direction is always easier, every time I make the “good” choice, I get a little stronger, and I escape my depression’s gravity field a little more.

after I am done bloggin’, I am going to take a short nap. William gets off work at 2 pm and will be heading here immediately. That gives me until 2 pm for a little nap. Hopefully, by dragging myself through blogging, I have woken myself up enough so that a brief nap is all I need in order to feel freshened up.

I have a liter of diet cola in me, but as usual, caffeine’s effects on me are somewhat unpredictable. I think people learn to use what caffeine gives by using it in conjunction with their jobs enough so that a firm association is made.

I have yet to have such an opportunity.

Hope I will in the future!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.