How I Am Doing

(Note: this was written on Thursday evening before I went to see Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Parts 1&2. I wrote it because I was trying to make some sense of what I was thinking, feeling and doing in my life. And I put it up here because I need to try to be accountable, and also because I am getting really sick and tired of answering the question "How are you?" If you're interested: this is how I'm doing. If you're not, just wait a couple of days/weeks and something better will be up here. Probably about comics or vacations or both.)



"I don't get what I want. I get to pretend things are going to be fine because people tell me they are going to be."

It’s been two weeks since my wife left. And since then life has kind of ground to a halt for me. I’m still making it to (almost) all my appointments, generally keeping up with my responsibilities, and seeing my friends and family. But if I had the choice I would be doing as close to nothing as I possibly could. Most days I can barely hold myself together.

Physically: I’m falling apart. I have stopped exercising entirely, and I have been putting absolutely no effort into eating well. Which means that I’m eating stuff with lots of cheese melted on top, and my diet has become about 35% take-out or delivery. I’ve gained 5 pounds since she decided to leave (the end of May), and probably another 10 pounds since the beginning of July. My lower back, which was feeling okay in May and the beginning of June, is starting to ache again. I know I should be more active and conscious of what I eat, I just don’t have any motivation to do so. (Also, I don’t have anyone to hold me accountable and provide me with healthy dinners, which was a big part of my progress in the first place.) And no matter how much sleep I get, four or seven or ten hours, it never feels like enough.

Mentally: I can’t concentrate. I can barely focus my attention on a single episode of 30 Rock let alone a movie of 90 minutes or more. And considering I am spending almost all of my downtime (when I'm not packing) watching movies…I get tired pretty quickly. Let’s repeat that for emphasis. I get tired. Because I need to focus. On watching a movie. That is just horrible. I can’t read any complicated prose, although I did manage to get through 50 pages of a new book at breakfast time. Usually the most reading I do in a day is when I absent-mindedly check my Twitter feed. This is the guy who used to read about 5 books and 15 comics collections in a month.

Emotionally: I am numb. The most powerful emotions I feel are sadness and anger, and since I don’t really have any solid person to blame for anything I am just spewing them into the void. I try to keep those under control whenever I can, although sometimes I can’t. And those are the days that seeing a scrap of paper with her writing on it, or a bottle of her favourite drink in the fridge, or a piece of mail addressed to the both of us, will set me off on a crying binge. I wake up from dreams where we're still together and I can barely bring myself to get out of bed. Dozens of times a day I forget that no, she won’t be home when I get back, and I won’t be able to tell her the good/bad/indifferent news of my day, and then I feel like I lose her all over again.

And when I’m not actively trying to deaden my emotions, I am passively numbed by exhaustion. I barely get excited to see my friends and family. After spending an hour with people I generally want to crawl into a corner and die, but often I soldier on. I can think of exactly three times in the past fourteen days that I felt real happiness, and that was all in the same weekend.

In two hours I will be going to see a group of my friends to watch movies. Normally that would be something I would be very excited about. But I am going to be surrounded by people who love me, in various forms, and the best I can muster is “attendance.” In five days I will be going to San Diego for Comic Con, something I have wanted to attend since I first found out about it over ten years ago. I am objectively looking forward to it, but that is in danger of being smothered by a startling amount of dread. And I can’t live the rest of my life, even if it’s only half a life, underneath a curtain of fear.

So I will try. I will make a list of things that I need to do in order to live, only pick a couple of them so I don’t get overwhelmed, and take it from there. And most importantly I will try REALLY hard not to beat myself up if I don’t succeed. I have a feeling that this upcoming chapter of my life will be dominated by failure. That’s something I don’t deal with very well when I’m at my prime. Hopefully it’s a short chapter. Hopefully it is big on character development and low on whining. And hopefully in the next chapter I get a jetpack.

How My 30th Birthday is Likely To Shape Up

1. I was supposed to carpool to work today, but the girl who was supposed to pick me up didn't set her alarm and just woke up when I called her three minutes ago.
2. When I get back into town from work, I will have to spend over $2000 on car repairs (on top of the $500 I spent two weeks ago), and hopefully my car will start more dependably.

Extrapolating from those two things, I believe my day will end with:

3. I will catch dysentary and spend 8 hours in agonizing, sleepless pain, which will abate 40 minutes before I have to go to work on Wednesday.


My 30th Birthday = wake up, buddy, it's grown-up times.

All I Am Is All You're Not

My brother took off for London, Ontario yesterday. He got accepted at the University of Western Ontario to study for his Master's degree, and he jumped at the chance: partly to study, partly to get out of Edmonton. I saw him off at the airport; I had dropped The Peach off there an hour earlier, so I figured I would just stick around and say goodbye to him. My mom and his girlfriend were there too, and I didn't want to steal their time with him so I just gave him a hug and said I'd send him an e-mail some time soon.

I've broken down crying four times today whenever I think about it. I didn't see him very often while he was here, but at least I did see him sometimes. And it hurts to know I can't just call him up or bump into him randomly any more. I didn't realize it was going to hit me this bad. And with no Peach around, I have been distracting myself as best I can, with beer and comic books. But there's nothing sadder than a grown man sobbing with a can of Black Label in his hand while reading an old issue of Excalibur. Anyhow. I just had to vent.

Revenge of The Test Fear

I'm not having a good night, folks. I write my CASLPA certification exam tomorrow (four hours, two hundred questions) and The Test Fear is setting in. A headache is creeping up on me, I can't concentrate on anything, and with every page or note I review or re-write, the words "there's no WAY you're going to do this" keep echoing in my head. I'm doing my best, but it's just so daunting; for every fact or theory I remember there are five more I need to review. I know it's almost pointless to keep studying, but I kind of have to. I normally don't react like this to tests, but this one's a BIG one, and unlike any other test I've ever written (except maybe the GRE), my entire life pivots around this test. I don't know. Maybe I should have started studying earlier, even though I did start at the end of January; maybe 2 months wasn't enough. Maybe I should have dedicated more time to it. Maybe I should have tried harder to get a hold of some other people who were studying for the exam too. I don't know that any of that would have helped my mood right now. I'd still be worrying, probably just as bad. But maybe then I'd at least be prepared and feel unprepared, as opposed to what I think I am now. Let's hope I'm not flushing $400 and the next year of my life down the drain.

(Sorry. I'm not normally this pathetic, but the stress is getting to me.)

My REAL Last Exam?

At the end of this month, I'm going to write my national exam, that will make me a member of the the national college and make me clinically certified. This will help me out in many ways: most places won't hire you unless you're nationally certified, plus you get a big reduction in your insurance rates and access to a lot of resources for professional improvement. It's also a big chunk of money and time. The money's been taken care of, thankfully, but for the next four weeks I'm going to be studying for a four-hour, 200-question exam that is on every class I've ever taken in my Master's program and decides whether or not I can hold a clinical position. Plus, the last class I took was over two years ago, so some of this stuff is like dredging up nearly-forgotten information. So, no pressure. Wish me luck, folks: I think I'm going to need it.

(At least looking through all my old textbooks and notes has reminded me how much I like my chosen career, though. If only I can re-remember it all...)

Good Omens

Last night I dreamt that one of my committee members showed up two hours late for my thesis presentation. I dreamt that the presentation itself took over eleven hours, that one person was adamant that I fail which threw the whole thing into deadlock, and that at one point I was so frustrated I crawled into a safety shower and turned it on while still wearing my clothes. So yeah. I'm not stressed or anything.

Return To The Echo Chamber

For about a week after I got back from Vancouver, I didn't feel like putting anything up here. I didn't know if I had anything important or interesting to say, if inded I had any before I left. Sounds like self-pity, but it's true. I didn't know if I'd been doing anything interesting or not. I'd sure been reading, watching, and listening to a lot of stuff, but I didn't know if that counted. So I just went about my business.

A week after that, I purposely ignored my little corner of the blogosphere. I tried not to look at the page at all - difficult as it's my browser's homepage - in an effort to see if I really needed it. What was I doing with it, after all? I don't put out hard-hitting exposés on the global news conglomerates; I don't put out daily or even semi-daily commentary on any kind of niche market; I don't use it as a diary of my daily chores and travels. I figured if I didn't have direction, I didn't have a point.

A week later, there were things that I was thinking about, wanted to write about, but because I'd been gone for two weeks, I couldn't bring myself to do anything. Inertia had set in. Better to just drown my spare time exploring various narratives and playing The Sims than think about things. I tried, for seven days, being lazy. I'm not exactly an active bundle of energy, really, but I just let the seeds of all the ideas in my brain fall on cracked, unforgiving earth. And it didn't matter. I didn't care. I just kept inching along at my new, slow pace.

But then this past week. I've been thinking. Even if sometimes I didn't want to. I think part of it has to do with me kick-starting my thesis-writing, getting back into the rational, incisive mindset, but there are things bouncing around in my head that, somehow, have taken root. And even though I think this blog has no real mission statement, maybe that's not true. Maybe it's for me to put things out there, anything that's rattling in my head. Sometimes it'll be to bring things to people's attention that I think are important, sometimes it'll be a sounding board for my grievances, sometimes it'll be ridiculous conversations and silly anecdotes, sometimes it'll be a place for me to hammer out my own opinions. It'll be a big patched-together, multi-purpose, writing engine. If there's anyone around still reading, that's a plus. I do like the idea of writing to an audience, and I get a little shiver of glee when I see a comment has been posted. But sometimes, all I need is to talk, even if no-one's listening.

So even though I'm spread out all over the place, in some of the various social networks this internet has to offer, I'll always come back here. Because I'm comfortable in the one place that's mine.

Ugh. Now I've finally put something up here, and it doesn't feel very polished. But it's done. The hard part's over, again.

Inertia

When I was three years old, I wrote my first story. Well, I told it to my dad and he wrote it down for me. I was always obsessed with stories; I loved my Disney and Star Wars books on record, which read to me before I knew how to read, and I loved sitting on the couch with my mom or dad and having them read a story to me, particularly one from the Golden Books. Even when I couldn't read, I would just open a picture book and pretend to read it to myself, until that day when I was four that I pulled out a book and realized that I wasn't pretending to read any more, I was actually doing it! But that's getting ahead of myself.

When I was three years old, I wrote my first story. Not the first story I ever made up, because I was making up stories for my Matchbox cars and Super-Friends action figures all the time. But the evening of May 11, 1982, I sat down with a pencil and a scrap of blue paper, and dictated the following story:


Mr. Potatohead and CBC*
Once upon a time on the
edge of The Black Forest,
they had packages
for fruit and toys. Then
there came a big frog.
Then there came a
big, big lion. And they
lived happily ever after.
The End


It's lacking a lot of story grammar, and there's no real compelling through line to it - What did they do with the fruit and toys? Where did these giant animals come from? - but it was mine. Writing that story is one of my first memories. Like I said, I'd made up stories before, but I knew that I just really wanted to have it written it down. I wanted to see my name beside those words, and I wanted other people to read it and like it as much as I liked it. I wanted to have it forever. Most stories written by three-year-olds don't last for twenty-five years, but thanks to my mom & dad's careful cataloguing of their first-born's activities, I have it pasted in my Me and Winnie-the-Pooh memory book, there to be laughed at and "aww"ed over for many more years.

From that point on, something stuck in me about writing. In my elementary school, there was a story writing competition; everyone wrote a story and the best story from each classroom made it into a collection printed at the end of the year. I won in Grade One, Grade Three, and Grade Five, in a sort of inversion of the Star Trek movie curse. I always made up stories and wrote stuff down, and naturally read books and watched movies as much as I could. Stories are part of my operating system. As a geek, it comes in awfully handy, as having a shared knowledge of stories with my other geeky friends leads to a lot of shorthand when we get together; all one of us has to do is say something like, "I'm gonna need a hacksaw"** or "This is coming out of your pay!"*** and we're all right there in that moment.

Which is why things are frustrating for me right now. My own personal story seems like it's stalling. Yesterday, to appease her parents, my lovely Peach went to live with them until we get married. My thesis is rolling so slowly the only way I know it's moving at all is that I'm not getting ahead of it as quickly as I used to. The wedding planning seems to be moving forward but I don't really feel like a part of it, even when I try helping. And I sit at this computer every night trying to think of something to write and failing miserably.

There's plenty to write about. I could write about my opinions on Spider-Man 3 (short review: not so good) or Pirates Of The Carribbean: At World's End (short review: wow, not bad). I could write about the struggles The Peach and I have as we try to integrate our lives together. (An excerpt from a conversation we had this evening. She: "Wow, I didn't realize how much beer you drank." Me: "It's one beer. I've had three beers in the past five days.") Hell, I could even write about how amazing The Sensational Spider-Man Annual #1 is (it continually breaks and fixes my heart). But every time I sit to write, nothing comes out, because I can't think that anything I write is going to be very interesting.

And that's always been part of why I write, why I put it down on paper or broadcas it to computer screens: to delight an audience, somewhere out there, wherever they are. For nine days I have tried to think of something to write, and have written nothing. I read. I watch. I laze around. And so my inertia takes control of me and I say nothing. But tonight, I face the inertia and just write something. It doesn't have to be good, or thoughtful, or even entertaining, it just has to be something. And I just did. So maybe that can crack the inertia that seems to be pervading the rest of my life now. We'll see.


* - A little background. When I was young I thought that the CBC logo I saw on tv was a character, like all the other drawings with voices I watched (The Smurfs, He-Man, and so on). Not only was I convinced that "The CBC" was a cartoon character, I was also convinced he was an evil cartoon character because he spoke in a loud, deep voice "THIS IS CBC!" about once every two or three hours. I was terrified of him. Why I made him best friends with Mr. Potato head in the story I do not remember.

** - Two cool points to the first person to guess where this quote comes from.

*** - Four cool points to the first person to guess where this quote comes from. If you need a hint, imagine it said with a Jamaican accent, but dock yourself a cool point****. Honour system, folks.

**** - Really, they should be called geek points, shouldn't they?