I’ve been having one of my sleepy days.

I knew I was not exactly in for a fun time today when I woke up all sweaty and dizzy and incoherent this morning. This is something that (thankfully) doesn’t happen that much to me any more, but it’s still a really pisser when it does.

It’s hard to describe the mental state it leaves me in. I can only repeat that it makes me feel like I just ran a marathon underwater and only barely made it back onto dry land. I wake up feeling incredibly physically and mentally tired, which is kind of the exact opposite of what sleep is supposed to do for a fella.

I ended up not being able to drag my ass out of bed until 10:15 am even though I woke up at 9:45 am. And true, I am a slow waker, but it doesn’t usually take me half an hour to get out of bed. But it seriously took that long for me to gather together enough of my wits to actually conceive of and execute the thought “get out of bed now”.

Then I got myself some water so I could hydrate myself and sat in front of the computer. Originally, I had planned to try out the game I just got off Steam last night, Skyrim,when I got up this morning. But I was way way too mentally fried to take in a new game. So I played another game, Heroes of Might and Magic 5, for a while.

I decided to get Skyrim because the reviews for it are absolutely insane. It has a Metacritic score of 94 percent, making it the tenth best PC game of all time according to their rankings. Plus I asked a few furs I knew and they attested to the game’s unrelenting awesomeness. And it was on sale for $22.

So I figured I would give it a shot. And some time soon…. I will. It’s all downloaded and installed and ready to go. I just need the time and mental coherence to do it.

Anyhow, I played HOMM5 for a while, and managed to finally beat the level that I had been stuck on for a while, so yay that.

That took me to 11:30 am, and at that point I had to choose. I could either :

a) Stay up, go eat lunch, and risk being incredibly sleepy in therapy at 1 pm, or

b) Get an hour of sleep, miss lunch, and go to therapy refreshed

And as we all know by now, it is a bad idea for me to ever skip a meal and that goes quintuple for the first meal of day which often occurs eight or ten or even twelve hours before the previous meal at midnight-ish.

Clearly, then, option A was the sensible and logical thing to do.

But I chose B because the very thought of not getting more sleep made me feel a chill like someone just rubbed an icicle against my heart.

And for what it’s worth, it worked. I set my alarm and took a nap for an hour and felt so much better afterwards that I felt almost coherent going into therapy.

It was not a great session. As usual, the life update section of the therapy took over and left no room for the part where I talk about myself and my problems.

I am seriously considering just skipping the life update bit next time, which is next Thursday at 1 pm. It’s not that I mind talking about what’s going on in my life. To have someone listening attentively while I do that is actually pretty gratifying for a ghost in the shadows like myself.

But it’s not what helps. It’s not what makes me saner and strong and more whole. What helps is when we dig deep and unearth the deep unspoken pains and take out the bits of psychological shrapnel, one by one, that are keeping me from healing.

And I need people’s help to get there. I need someone asking and probing in order to shake the calcified emotions loose and bring them into my consciousness so I can deal with them and lessen my psychological burden.

That, for me, is what therapy is for. It’s what keeps me going back. And while I know that not every session will produce a major breakthrough, when it does like it did today, I end up feeling like it was a waste of time.

Admittedly, I had a lot to talk about life-wise, what with the big project I have become part of. ^[1] It’s a big life event and I am incredibly happy to be part of it. I feel so lucky that I got something like that barely a week after graduating. I hope we make our show and sell it to someone, even if it’s just a tourism board.

But Andy assures me that no matter what, it will get made. I find that highly reassuring. Even if it never goes anywhere, I will at least have something to show prospective employers that shows I can be a good team member and make things which are good.

And by God, it will be good or I will die trying.

I realized today that I think I am the only person who can anywhere close to working on the show full time. I think the others either work full time (like Andy) or are students.

That might mean that it will be up to me to keep pushing the thing forward. Fine. I can do that. I can be the sparkplug. I can be (as Terry Jones put it) the terrier nipping at people’s heels to keep them moving forward.

I think it might also end up being up to me to keep things focused, as part of that job. I can do that too. I have been pondering what we should be doing next, and I have some ideas.

I want to do an advanced technology test, where we take the equipment out and try some on location shooting so that we can figure out what we need and make as many of the dumb mistakes as we can BEFORE shooting.

I want to start develop our method for finding and enlisting our Secret Informants. They are going to be the heart of the show and we will need to pick our people with care.

I am going to start developing the pitch documents for the show. I would have done them already but I keep forgetting to set side time to do it.

I should be able to slap together a one-sheet at least. And a logline.

I hope my partners in this endeavour can handle the sheer voltage I plan on bringing to this project of ours.

This is no longer just some idea of Andy’s.

It’s my future, and I am going to make it happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.