Feeling sort of blank today. Which is, on some levels, an improvement.
I seem to be back at the restless, angry, and nihilistic phase of my mood cycle. Violent impulses pass through me like gangs of angry rioters. Part of me just wants to smash and destroy everythign and everybody until I can get some peace and quiet in this loud and chaotic mind of mine.
My id wakes up cranky, it seems.
Right now my plan is to maintain and monitor this mood, see where it goes. As unpleasant as it can be to endure, this is exactly the sort of mood that I can use to force some growth if I time things properly and push at the right moment.
I have a lot of pain to birth, and a pissed off mood is a great time for that.
Part of what has me pissed off is this cold that I have had for more than a week now and just won’t go the fuck away. I was positive it was on the way out because my sniffles were disappearing and then I wake up this morning and it has moved into my chest instead and now I am coughing and my chest is full of goo.
I liked the sniffles better. I am used to sniffles. I am great at sniffles.
The fact that this also leads to a certain amount of social isolation doesn’t help matters any either. I can’t hang with my dearest friend Felicity much because she lives with her elderly parents, both of whom have had medical procedures recently, and thus should not be exposed to my goddamned germs.
Fuck my life.
Another thing making me feel pissy is that I am having trouble finishing a module I downloaded for Dragon Age : Origins. The fights at the end are quite hard and I am really struggling to get through.
I have already restarted the thing with a new character once and I am pondering doing it again so I can try it as a mage. It’s not that long a module so starting over again would not be a huge deal, and I am quite good at playing a mage.
Guess I am a wizard at heart. I am at my best when hurtling fireballs and shooting lightning bolts. It is so much more fun than swinging a sword around. Everything else is so boring by comparison.
I’ve also been playing a surprisingly good CCG type game called Eternal. At first blush, it seems pretty much like any other Magic : The Gathering style video game, but the system is very well thought out and deep and has a lot of innovations that are both highly effective and completely original to it.
I have even gotten into playing against other actual people. This is huge for me. As patient readers know, I am usually a very anti-social gamer. I don’t do multiplayer anything most of the time.
I game to escape my social anxiety, not trigger it. Sad but true.
But I guess the fact that the game doesn’t allow chat or anything like it and that it’s a turn based thing makes it socially non-stimulating enough for me to take it.
I will be back for Round 2 later.
For my whole life, I have felt like I was failing because I never seemed to give people the responses they wanted from me.
It’s hard to explain but I am going to give it a try.
Take my infamous “test” to see if I “needed” to go to kindergarten. I responded to what seemed like a highly absurd situation – a silly woman talking in a silly way going through super easy exercises very slowly at the head of the class(“draw a cir-cle around the mir-or) , and then this schmuck over my shoulder trying to coach me through these absurdly – heck, insultingly – easy exercises (‘Now which one is the mirror… remember, that’s the thing Mommy uses when she puts on her make-up….) – in the way that was most natural to me – with amused and affronted contempt.
That’s not what they wanted or expected. It’s not even something they knew how to handle. My responses were alien to them.
And that’s been the pattern my whole life. Even when I am doing my best to be friendly and affable and agreeable, my responses never seem to satisfy people. There is always something a little off about them. I can tell.
Quite often it has taken the form of what I call being “inconveniently intelligent”. Like seeing through a practical joke or some other kind of social bonding type trickery. Or confounding people’s sense of the rules by doing schoolwork with contemptuous ease.
Even in university, this kept happening. My professors would repeatedly be taken aback by how quickly and thoroughly I absorbed the material and how I would immediately start extrapolating outward from the material at a very high level.
Same with asking questions in class. From my point of view I was doing what all the other students were doing, namely asking for clarification on points.
But my questions were questions they had never been asked before, and I would not blame professors if it sometimes seemed to them like I was attacking them.
I wasn’t. I just wanted to know.
The worst kind of wrong response is the socially wrong response, of course. There I am, trying to get along with normal people, smiling, friendly, agreeable, etc.
And then I get what I can clearly tell is a social cue, and I respond with what I think is being asked of me, and everything comes to a dead stop because that was not the right answer and people don’t know how ot handle it and suddenly I have made all the fish aware of the water they are swimming in and this enormous gulf opens up between me and others and it’s super awkward and I hate myself.
But fuck it. You get what you get with me, world. I’m a unique individual and I will never fulfill your expectations because nothing I do will ever be normal.
But if you stick with me, you will realize that I might be weird but I am also very nice and a heck of a guy when you get to know me.
Those who can make the trip get my sparkling, stimulating company.
Those who can’t can go fuck themselves.
No really, they can. I can prove it. I have pictures.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.