Blogosaurus Vex

I’m off for my trip.  Be back in a week!

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So… Remember how I told you all I got some new plants? But I couldn’t show you a picture because I don’t have a camera? Well. Guess who bought a camera today?

Posted in Domesticity | No Comments »

Well.  No word yet from Workaholic Landlord and that can only mean one thing, because it simply isn’t possible that he hasn’t seen my email yet: he has planned to say NO to cat but can’t be bothered because he’s too busy adjusting his monocle and chortling over the credit crash in the States (WL surely prefers to buy low?).

Or, he wants to say YES to cat but really, really wants it to be super special for me and he’s planning a surprise party in which there will be dozens of cats for me to lounge with and select my favourite from.  There will be punch and cookies and music and a representative of every cat breed and colour!

Denial.  It makes the world go round.

Here’s some more: If we’re allowed to get a cat, it looks like what we’ll do is head down to the SPCA and select from among the adult cats, you know, the ones that are doomed for the big Dirt Nap because everyone wants a fluffy kitten.  Of course I can’t totally rule out being brain-commandeered by a fluffy kitten if I see one but my intentions are noble.  Also, since Husband is, at best, indifferent to cats, I figure an adult would be the best introduction to them.  No zany kitten antics.

Sigh.  Back to reality.

First no dog, and now no cat?  Should I downgrade my request?  Maybe next I could ask for a hamster.  If he still says no then I could ask for a lizard, then a bird, then a goldfish, then finally perhaps an aphid on a blade of grass in a tupperware jar.

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Last year my landlord crushed me like a bug when he refused to let us get a dog.  Now I am hoping he doesn’t crush me a second time, because I have asked if we can get a cat.

Since he is a hard working professional who checks his email constantly, I imagine we’ll have an answer rather soon.  So, internet, you don’t have much time to focus all your energy on persuading him via the ether to say YES to cat.  Focus!

I will keep you posted on outcomes.

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I have a friend who is dealing with a major crisis in her life.  And it is turning her into a jerk.  A jerk whose calls I am no longer taking.  I do not know how to navigate this problem.

The last few times we’ve talked the conversation has turned into a Blogosaurus-bashing event.  She said some things that really aren’t acceptable (bashing me and bashing Husband).  She also said some things that really weren’t fair either (using private and painful things I’d told her in confidence as ammo in the bashing).  And I was totally surprised and taken aback.  She’s gone way over the line of Things You Are Allowed to Say to Your Friends.

But I didn’t say anything to her about this because really, she has huge shit going on right now.  Her shit makes my shit look like no shit at all.  I can’t justify adding to her pile of shit by complaining to her about my shit.  Clearly she it at maximum overload, totally stressed out, totally afraid, and totally unable to maintain normal and healthy interpersonal relationships.  Crisis is not bringing out the best in her.  I feel guilty for being upset when she has things to much worse.

But the truth is, I can’t let it go.  I would like to be the sort of person who is so understanding and resilient that her bad behaviour just rolls off me, and I forbear with saint-like understanding and caring.  I would like to really not be bothered, to really be a good support to her.  But I am discovering something somewhat unpleasant about myself, which is that I am not nearly that good at being a friend to someone in crisis.  I think I had this fantasy of myself as her supportive rock, the one she could count on no matter what.  Well ha ha, turns out she can only count on me until she starts pissing me off, at which point I start screening her calls.  Can you smell the guilt.

Though here’s something else: just because she has it bad doesn’t give her permission to make my life miserable, especially when I have been trying to help.

So I have no idea what to do next.  I know she’s in bad enough shape that there’s nothing to be gained by confronting her on this issue.  She’s not open to feedback right now.  But I’m not open to being shat on by her any more either.  Another niggling problem is that, as I learn more about her through this process, I am seeing a lot of things I really don’t like in her.  I’m no longer sure how committed I am to maintaining this friendship at all.

What a mess.

Posted in Existential Angst, Personal | 3 Comments »

Months of reasonably successful sleeping tricked me into thinking I might be transforming into one of those normal people who just sleep when they’re tired.  But ha ha, it was just a trick.  Woke up this morning at four to pee and haven’t been back to sleep yet.  I finally gave up, got up, and cleaned the living room.  I feel like four pounds of shit in a three pound bag.  But startlingly awake and alert!  I can actually feel my eyes opening as wide as possible.  It’s enraging, basically.

When you are an insomniac, being tired has nothing whatsoever to do with sleeping.

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Here is the major problem with doing psychology for a job: everyone thinks they know it all already.  Everyone is a person, everyone has relationships, therefore everyone figures they have inter- and intra-personal dynamics figured out.  This is totally logical and in fact true to a point – we are all amateur psychologists, and we need to be to get through life.  Okay.  But people’s amateur psychological skillz are usually not much more than this: heavily biased heuristics, general guesses, and hypotheses that may (or may not) be right, some or all of the time.  Generally speaking these theories are good enough for folks to get by, with greater or lesser degrees of adaptation, and therefore act as reinforcers.   You have some idea of why people do things, and it’s good enough to let you function in life, so that means you must be right.  Right?  Only sort of.

In some ways it’s really frustrating to be learning a lot about psychology because, by its very nature, people figure they already know it.  It’s not uncommon at all to hear people pull out their pet psychological theories and, while I am by no means an expert, I know a lot more than your average layman.  Some of the stuff people come up with is pretty bad (by which I mean wrong, or misguided, or incomplete, or shamelessly self serving, etc.).  I don’t even bother to say anything most times because as I have learned the hard way, people are attached to their theories and aren’t really interested in what the research says.  That’s fine, I don’t want to go through life teaching people all the time (okay maybe a little), and I am, as I say, not yet an expert.  But sometimes it is hard to swallow when someone goes off with great authority about their theory that is dead wrong and I want to bang my head against a wall that people think they know this field simply because they are in possession of some folk psychological know-how.

It’s hard becoming an expert in a field where most people don’t even realize there can be experts.  I doubt nuclear physicists have this problem.

Posted in Psychology, Ranting | 4 Comments »

I live right near Science World here in Vancouver.  For those who don’t know anything about this city, my neighbourhood should conjure up images of water, parks, and nice yuppie families strolling with babies through one on the edge of the other.  Well, the west side of my block is like this.  The east side is full of junkies and panhandlers, but we’ll let that go for today.  Anyway, Vancouverites will know this.  What they might not know is the Horrible Truth about the park across the street from me: it’s where the dragon boaters go.

I don’t know what a dragon boat is.  It looks like a big canoe with too many rowers to me but what do I know?  Also, it appears to be powered entirely by fear and shouting, because each dragon boat has some loud mouthed shouter in it, screaming at the line of rowers, and they all furiously row, I assume to prevent the shouter from peeling their skins off like a banana and rubbing salt on what’s left over.  It’s the only thing that explains the violence and energy that goes into the rowing.

Did I mention the shouter?  Did I mention I can hear those fuckers in my bedroom at the crack of fucking dawn?  Did I mention I don’t like being shouted at at the crack of fucking dawn?

Especially when I am in the midst of a nerve attack, my first in several months.  It came on last night while out with friends (Lara, welcome to the strange world of BV where you find out more about me from the blog than from real life).  A group of us ladies hit a bar and swapped stitches stories while drinking – and by around ten I could tell my crazy nerves were getting agitated (for those new here: I have some kind of thus far undiagnosed problem with neuropathic pain).  I hung on for an hour or so but realized I needed to get home pretty soon so I could get the horrible, irritating clothes off my body and lie around in extreme discomfort for the rest of the night.  And on until it abated.

Plus I have a paper to finish today that is due tomorrow.  Which seemed like the better reason for leaving to put forward, since I didn’t know everyone there and didn’t want to be all, “Hey new people I just met, I really feel like ripping my clothes off, so I have to go home now.”  Anyway, I said goodnight and came home, to do exactly as planned: try not to move and just be miserable most of the night.  Finally around three I fell asleep, and this is great because there is no pain in sleep, or at least there wasn’t, until some mother fucking piece of shit dragon boat shouter started up and woke me.  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their nether regions.

Now I’m up, preparing to dig into the paper, and feeling seriously crabby about how shitty I feel (and wouldn’t be, if I was still sleeping).  Let’s hope it improves enough for me to go to Mission tonight for a game I’m playing out there.

Posted in Health, Ranting | 6 Comments »

Last night I signed back up for Facebook (this time not spamming my entire email list… sorry for that) … and yeah, I am reminded again of just how incompetent I am with the internet.  I get completely overwhelmed with all the options and messages and images and have no idea what to do with it all.  But it’s kind of fun anyway.

Speaking of internet uselessness, I will now confess something that will ensure anyone who thought I was cool no longer will: I also can’t use iTunes.  I know.  This officially classifies me as the mental equivalent of a turnip.  I downloaded it… and boom, some crazy page with a million flashing things comes up, and all these colours, and I had no idea what to click or where, and what would happen if I did.  About twenty minutes of anxious fiddling later I uninstalled the stupid thing and put on a CD.

I think this internet retarded-ness is related to what is probably some kind of learning disability that I have related to visual images.  I have a really had time assimilating and making sense of visual images, particularly flat images with a lot of colour like comic books, advertisements, and web pages.  It’s hard to explain because you’re not in my head but this is how I think it works: You look at a comic and see Rhinosferatu (Toren, tell me if I should not link to your image).  I look at that and see a grey lump floating over a white blob with a red plus in the middle and brown lines and a sticky-out part.  It’s just a jumble of colours and shapes.  About five seconds later it resolves into a coherent image, the latter-day Crusader Rhinosferatu.  During those five seconds I am frowning and trying to sort out in my mind just what the heck I’m looking at.  It doesn’t come together all at once.

And that’s a relatively simple image.  Full comic pages really blow my mind.  There’s so much going on – every character is against a background of detailed stuff: walls, nature, whatever.  I have trouble telling figure from ground in those kinds of situations.  First I have to figure out where the thing I’m supposed to be seeing is (separating the character from his environment), then figure out what the character is (a person? A robot? A ninja in disguise?).  The more complicated the image, the longer it takes me.  This is probably why I don’t read comics.  I’ve read a few series but man is it a lot of work!

Here’s another manifestation of it: I usually don’t know what is on the covers of my books.  I read the titles (I have no trouble with text), get the gist of the colour and pattern of the artwork for recognition purposes, and that’s it.  I usually don’t know what the actual art is, because I usually don’t bother trying to work it out and it certainly doesn’t happen automatically.  Here’s an example.  I read this book last week.  The cover is two apples bum up, but I didn’t know that for the three months I owned the book and let it lie on my bedside table until I was ready to read it.  And I didn’t spot the apples until I was almost done the book, which involves dozens of iterations of picking it up and putting it down as I go about my day.  It is probably obvious to you, but to me, it’s just two red blobs and some green areas and two brown bits.  I have to work to make it into apples.

Usually I just have this problem with printed (or web) images, but it has happened in real life too.  For example, I have occasionally not been able to figure out what my toaster is.  Sounds funny but trust me, it’s not.  I enter the kitchen, and look to the right, and there is a silvery box with two black boxes on it and a black line coming out the back.  And I haven’t got a clue what I’m looking at.  It sort of loses its three-dimensionality.  I stare… I squint… and there, it’s the toaster.  It’s like the different parts of the image aren’t hanging together – they exist as separate blobs of colour and shape that don’t immediately resolve into a single item.  This real life version of the problem happens only occasionally.

So when webpages are really colourful and complicated to look at, I have a bitch of a time using them until I learn them.  Sometimes I just can’t learn it on my own though, and iTunes was one of those times I guess.

Bet you didn’t know I was retarded, did you?

Posted in Personal | 6 Comments »

I went to my first meditation class tonight.  I really liked it.  It seems incredibly simple yet incredibly difficult at the same time – most intriguing!  Also, it felt great (but hard).  The teacher was really encouraging and interesting, and they served tea and cookies afterward!  Looks like this will be a weekly event for the members of the BV household.

Anyone out there meditate?  Thoughts on the matter?

Posted in Health | 3 Comments »