Until this moment, I have given absolutely no thought to what I am going to write about tonight. This should be fun.

This morning was stressful.

It didn’t start out that way. It started out with me feeling pretty good, actually. Every once in a while, I will wake up in the middle of the night full of energy and verve. Enough so that it is physically painful to sit still. This leaves me with no choice but to get up and stay up.

It’s possible that this phenomenon is akin to the hypomanic state. As the name suggest, that’s a state that is like the mania of manic depressive disorder, but was less acute. During a hypomanic period, you feel good, you have loads of energy, life seems quite lovely, and you will find it nearly impossible to sleep.

Apart from the sleep bit, it’s really quite lovely. I’d recommend it. Five stars.

So what did I do with my bounty of energy? Something productive? Heck no. I played my current video game (Mass Effect) for a couple of hours. But the main point is that I was feeling pretty good.

And getting ready for school seemed so easy and I was remembering all kind of things that I normally forget to do. I put my book in my bag, remember to take my headphones (I forgot Monday), put my watch on, grabbed my wallet, and left feeling really good and totally on top and in control.

Now, kids, do you know what I forgot? The clues are all in there!

SPOILER : It was my fucking keys.

Alert readers will remember that I was a latchkey kid and I have a lot of mildly traumatic memories of having to sit and wait for my mother to get home before I could get in.

So forgetting my keys is kind of a thing with me. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it really throws me for a loop.

I realized my error when I was barely around the block from the apartment building, but I might as well have been a thousand miles away in terms of my having the power to fix the situation at that time.

My first thought, of course, was that I would just go back and get it. But of course, to do that, I would have to get back into my apartment build, and to do that. I would need to have my fucking keys.

It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch-22.

For a moment I thought of skipping class, or at least being very late, as I frantically tried to get back home. But then I caught hold of myself, calmed down, and realized that I was perfectly capable of going to class and back, and the keys thing could wait.

So I manage to get to the Skytrain station and onto the Skytrain with no more than the usual amount of pain, and realize that I don’t have the two local free papers that I picked up on the way into the station because I put them down to use my fare card and forgot to pick them back up again.

Oh well, at least I remembered my book.

Then I arrive at my destination, get off the Skytrain…. and realized I lost my hat. It was still on the Skytrain car I was watching pull out of the station.

It was morning rush hour. The trains don’t stop for long.

So not only did this mean that I could no longer wear my beloved headphones and listen to my even more beloved music collection (no hat to protect the headphones), it meant all that cold rain was going to fall directly on my head.

And me just getting over a cold. Lovely. At least I have been taking my time-release Vitamin C tablets.

So today has not been fun. It’s like when I realized I had forgotten my keys, someone flipped the switch from “good day” to “bad”. But at least I was hyper alert to enjoy it!

Not that I’m bitter.

Getting home was almost as bad. It was like getting there, only the rain was warmer. And now I do not have a hat to keep the rain offa my head. And that is gonna suuuuuuck.

I will try to motivate myself to include a trip to the Value Village a couple of blocks from here to get a new hat sometime soon.

Class itself was fine. The awesomely named Hamish Macintosh is a good teacher and we did an exercise where the idea was to come up with as many ideas for selling a fictional arthritis treatment for older dogs as we could in 45 minutes.

Ideas plus animals? That is my wheelhouse, son.

And my ideas were shamelessly manipulative. I honest sort of felt like I was using my powers for evil, because I was using my understanding of how animal loving people think in order to best hack their wetware.

Advertising is a weird ass game. But I am too old to worry about the ethics of marketing. If that’s what someone will pay me to do, that’s what I will do.

Soul for sale, priced to move, motivated seller!

And I am pretty sure I would be very good at it. I understand what makes people tick and I know how to appeal to them both emotionally and logically. And you can make crazy amounts of money in marketing.

As for “selling out”, I would love to do it. Well, except that I never really had a huge investment in my artistic integrity either. I mean, I care about it, and it would kill me to be associated with something way below my standards… but I could learn to live with it if it came with lots of dough.

I will worry about artistic integrity after I have bought a house. And some kind of financial instrument  to keep me set for life.

Turns out you can purchase your freedom from wage slavery.

It’s just really, really expensive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.