Well, here I am, blogging at 7:03 am because I am weird.

But like, new weird. Not the old weird that used to be the new normal but is now, quite frankly, the old and boring.

See how much sense that makes?

Anyhow, I am doing part one of my blogginating at this ungodly hour for a number of reasons, which I shall now denote :

1. I just finished playing a marathon session of Fallout 3 because once I started playing this kickass DLC where you get abducted by aliens and get to shoot a lot of them as you take over the ship, I just couldn’t stop. It was like my number one space opera era fantasy come true : to show a bunch of mean abductor type aliens that they picked on the wrong species this time! And after all that alien zapping, I have a lot of extra mental energy to burn
2. I wanted to rave about the DLC,. Mission accomplished.
3. I know that I will be busy with FRED tonight and hence not get my usual 7 pm blogging sesh in, so I figured I would write now and at 1 pm when I have lunch, and work it that way, and finally…
4. I am breaking old patterns to make room for newer, better ones, and let me tell you, it feels fantastic

Let me give you a picayune example.

When it came time for me to do the midnight munchies and viewing stuff with Joe and Julian last night, my cookie situation was thus : I had four Fruit Creme type cookies left, and an unopened box of Woortman sugar free wafer cookies in a flavour I had never tried before, namely orange creme. ^[1]

Normally, I would unthinkingly follow my compulsion to finish things before starting anything new and eat the fruit cremes.

But fuck compulsions. I have been letting them run my life for far too long because it was easier than actually having to make up my mind about things.

Pretty sad, right?

This is why having Mars in Pisces sucks so much. Mars is the planet of action and problem solving and initiative, and Pisces is the planet of passivity and indecision and lack of motive power.

Water doesn’t do anything on its own, after all, except seek its lowest level.

But I am getting over it. I am learning to accept structure within myself. I am willing to sacrifice some flexibility in my shapeshifting in order to grow a goddamned skeleton.

I am so goddamned tired of being so goddamned weak that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get some fire and power into my spirit and stop being so damn limp.

I am sick to death of being theoretically amazing. Potentially outstanding. A genius without muscle, a millionaire on paper, the ghost of someone who someday might have been someone worth noticing.

In fact, right now I might even settle for some genuine, actual, verifiable mediocrity.

At least I would have something real for a change.

More after the break.

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Clueless and adorable

That’s me all right.

And the two things are not unrelated. I think, as the youngest of four, I learned to be cute more of less from birth.

I didn’t know I was doing it, of course. It’s just the survival strategy I evolved into. When you are the youngest, you survive by being adorable and hence attracting nurturing.

The fact that it stopped working at some point did not break this pattern. And the problem with that pattern is that there is a lot – a LOT – of learned helplessness that comes with the package.

You survive by demonstrating that you need help, thus attracting help. In my case, by stumbling around cluelessly and doing the best I can with the unconscious hope that someone will take pity on me and/or find my fumbling incompetence adorable.

That is not an easy thing for any adult man to admit, but it’s especially hard for me because I have built up this picture of myself nobly resisting people taking things away from me because I am not doing them right and doing it themselves while all the time, I now realize, I have been depending on them doing so.

Because we all know what happens when I am left to my own devices.

My devices suck.

But is that true, or is that just the learned helplessness talking? I have thought of myself as a stumbling fool for so long that I honestly can’t tell. It could very well be that I am a lot more competent than I have traditionally let myself be because to actually rise to my own level of competence would be to risk losing the support I get from others, and getting said help is like my primary survival mechanism.

What if I dissuade my helpers and find out I can’t do it on my own? Then what?

On the other appendage, I won’t develop the kind of backbone and independence I crave and that I know is needed for me to grow up if there is always someone there to catch me when I fall.

So I either need to make a clean break from my current lifestyle and go live on my own for a while so I can learn to stand on my own two feet, or simply accept, fully, that dependence is part and parcel of who I am and how I live, and learn to adapt to that while still developing a positive self-image.

Honestly can’t tell which of those is harder, to be honest.

I suppose for now, I will try to make peace with being people’s oddball clumsy pet who is dependent like any other pet, but pays his own way in other ways.

But some day I will need to get away from it all and learn to live on my own.

Only then will I be able to truly become who I am.

And who I need to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.