Been thinking more about how I have been subconsciously trying to act like a sitcom character lately.

What got me thinking about it was an exchange I had with a cashier at my favorite sandwich spot, Bon Chaz. I had finished ordering and I made some sort of joke – I forget what it was – and she responded with a kind of halfhearted “ha ha ha” kind of laugh.

Now the fact that my joke failed to laugh is not that big a deal. Most of mine don’t, especially in RL.

But what I caught myself feeling was a grave disappointment. And not just a disappointment in myself – that’s par for the course – but a disappointment in the world. As if that wasn’t supposed to happen. As if I thought my joke was great so their SHOULD have been laughter.

As if I had been sufficiently “sitcom” and should now be rewarded by the laugh track.

Like I said before, it’s clearly a bad idea to try to interact with others as thought life is a sitcom. For one thing, these people aren’t in on the game (neither was I, until recently) and therefore the effort is doomed from the start.

For another thing, from a purely comedic point of view, a joke might make a great sitcom joke but be a lousy real world joke. It’s as if I am playing up to the invisible audience in my head while expecting the real world to reward me for pleasing it.

That’s clearly not gonna fly. Yet I don’t know how to change. It’s pretty fundamental to how I operate. I am not sure I could adjust to living entirely in the real world. I need my various escapist filters on reality in order to be able to handle the intensity of it all.

To an introvert, the world is very loud.

All I can do, I suppose, is beaver away at slowly destroying this particular delusional structure until something happens in my life that will make me better able to live in the real world.

Like, say, gainful employment and the resultant boost of self-worth and feeling of greater security. Not to mention the ability to afford more leisure activities and other ways to actually get what I want, instead of being frozen out of the warm and beautiful world by wretched poverty.

Well, semi-wretched, anyhow.

I learned something rather exciting today from one of my profs, Kelsey. He told us that comedy writers makes more money than drama writers by far.

Which of course made my eyes turn into dollar signs accompanied by an old fashioned cash register CHA CHING sound. Writing comedy is my thing, dawg, and the fact that sitcoms have huge writer’s rooms full of writers means that they always need new talent to replace the talent that has gone on to better things or just plain burnt out.

This fills me with hope. Getting a high income sounds grand and I am positive I can come up with jokes at least as funny as the ones on shows like Big Bang Theory.

So the future looks bright indeed to me right now.

It’s very frustrating to be where I am in my spiritual development right now.

Because I can feel that there’s life out there to be had. I strain toward it every moment of every day. But it’s like there is this invisible membrane, like a layer of cellophane, holding me back, letting me to approach life but not reach it and embrace it.

Part of the problem is that I am still, for the most part, following the old patterns. And I know that new ways of being come from changing your patterns. Doing new things. Acquiring new inputs to replace the old ones that have fallen into a stupor from overuse. Open the windows and let some fresh air in to the house of my soul.

But change is hard for me. I lack the necessary courage. That enervating dread rears its ugly head when I think about it. So things that on the surface would be easily accomplished seem impossible because of the use chasm of fear between me and them.

For instance, I could just decide one night to go to something. Either here in Richmond or downtown or somewhere in between. A play, an improv night, a place with a nice walk and plenty of places to sit. There’s endless possibilities.

And all I have to do is pick one that seems like it would be fun. And go there.

Hmmmm. It just occurred to me. Steamworks Bath House is downtown too. One of these days I could hop on a bus after class and, ya know, go exploring.

Just tried to look up how to get from my VFS campus at 198 West Hastings to Steamworks at 123 West Pender, and get this… Translink seems to think that is a literally impossible journey. It won’t give me any directions at all, just an error message in read that says there’s no route and that this is due to one of three factors :

No service is provided during this time of day. Um, nope, we are talking downtown Vancouver at 4 pm. Approximately ALL the busses are on the road at that time.
Your starting and ending point are more than 0.5 km from the closest transit stop Also nope. The corner near my school and the block up from it has stops for like, ten different buses.
An unreasonable number of transfers, or a trip longer than three hours The unused portion of the nope. Dunno how many transfers, but the two points are definitely NOT three hours apart.

So it seems I have stumbled upon a an intriguing mystery. What could be the source of this error? Could 123 Pender be an “unlisted” address in the databases of Translink? If so, why? Could it be that Steamworks prefers it that way because it lends a certain discretion to their business? Or could there be some secret homophobes working in the Translink IT department?

Or could it be a very boring and entirely ordinary computer glitch?

On thing’s for sure : I am going to get to the bottom of this, even if I have to go to the top to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.