Okay, so it’s a tad past eleven. I blame traffic.

In my case, the frizzies in question are mental, not… follicular. Now is the sensible time to be blogging as I will be out this evening, but right now all I want to do is go back to sleep.

I am slowly learning to take that philosophically. I am doing my best to find a middle ground between my need for a greater quantity of sleep due to its low quality, and the cowardly impulse to sleep in order to escape reality and all its complications and issues.

Right now, I am suffering through one of my fits of indecision. There are so many things I could be doing right now that it’s making it hard for me to choose the one I should be doing and just do it. I feel trapped at the crossroads of infinity and it makes me anxious.

But I will work my way through it. After all, this is an extremely familiar problem that I guarantee I will face many more times in the future and so it’s a problem worth going through some Hell to fix.

I just need to work through the anxiety to the point where emotion is no longer getting in the way of sensible decision making and prioritization. And when that happens, the solution will fall into place and it will be so simple and obvious that I will wonder what all the fuss was about.

It’s happened before and it will happen again. The trick is to make sure it happens before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Waiting for failure and inaction to resolve the tension and release the anxiety is most definitely a maladaptive coping strategy.

Hmmm. Perhaps that kind of relief is part of what makes depression so hard to treat. The patient is addicted to that feeling of relief of tension. That’s the unseen motivator of a lot of “failure” coping strategies. Doing something right takes time, attention, and focus, and those extend the time in that painful panicky anxious state far too long. Whereas failure is instant relief, and even when it doesn’t get you out of the situation immediately, you don’t care because when you stop trying, there’s no more fear of failure.

It’s a very strange kind of emotional alchemy, but it’s what goes on in the mind of us broken people. Strong emotion usurps our reason and causes us to make short-sighted choices just to relieve the unpleasant emotion.

The irony being that the root cause of the problem might well be an over-rational mindset that filters out emotional impulses and acts only on what it thinks is reason.

Emotional needs get ignored in favour of mental stimulation and things go all to hell inside the person’s psyche. In response : further suppression of emotion, further dependence on the “cold circuit” intellectual pleasures, and that swamp gets even deeper.

And all because someone never learned to deal with their emotions properly.

Well, and massive emotional trauma.

Wounded birds don’t fly.

Tonight, I will be meeting with Felicity and Garth about our Paragon project. It’s a wacky show about the world’s cheapest paranormal detective agency. They deal with the cases that are too weird, too unglamorous, or just plain too stupid for the other agencies to deal with. It’s a sci fi comedy that we have been developing for ages.

Now that I am no longer a VFS student, I have time to develop it further with my friends. Hopefully, I will write some short, simple scripts for 30 second-ish bits we can put online soon. Some little snippets that we can pull off without much in the way of complicated equipment or tricky editing.

Just some smart, funny people, and our cameras.

I just realized : there’s no such thing as a digital camera any more. They’re all digital. Film cameras have gone the way of the Victrola. I am sure there are hipsters taking snapshots with “vintage” Polaroids out there, but for the most part, film’s not even a thing any more.

So that;s another technology that has died in my lifetime. That’s one of the perils of being an old nerd, I suppose. You’ve lived long enough to see what you think of as “technology” to get supplanted by the new hotness.

Not that I have anything against the new hotness. If I think it’s better, I will adopt it. It might take me a while to do it, but I will do it eventually. I

In my defense, I have always been like that. You would not believe how hard I resisted using Windows 3.1 back in the days of DOS. I liked my command line interface, and had gotten pretty good with it. Compared to that, using some stupid thing with pictures that you need to use the mouse to use seemed clunky and absurd.

And vaguely insulting too, now that I think of it. Like I needed pretty pictures and a point and click interface to use my computer!

I guess that’s how the Linux users feel.

In fact, at that time, I resented having to use the mouse for anything. Even video games. Not sure how long that lasted, but I know it ended when I used mouse + keyboard for an FPS game and realized how much easier that made things.

So what I am saying is that I have always been stubborn, resistant to change, and contrarian. I don’t like feeling like I am supposed to be using the new thing, and often only adopt it once everyone else has done it and therefore the herd has cleared.

And yeah, I know that;s kind of anti-social of me. But that’s okay. There is nothing wrong with knowing you are not the most outgoing person in the world and that it’s okay to set limits that are perhaps stricter than the average person’s.

It’s the burden every Taurus bears, I think. We can be geniality itself, sharing our vast equanimity and making everyone feel comfortable and relaxed.

But when the party is over, seriously, get the fuck out.

We need our space back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.