Sorry to interrupt the Phone Guys marathon, but I really ought to be posting something here, I suppose.

I am in the midst of a twenty year low, as far as my mental health is concerned. Twenty years exceeds the age of this website, so if we take the Book Of PDR as the record of my adult life, I am at my all-time low.

I feel like anyone who happens to read this can see the many ways our society is being ruined by those with power and whose only concern is remaining powerful. Obviously that is a big part of the problem for me. I wish I could do anything about that, but I don’t see how. People who function in society more successfully than I do would probably say something like “if you’re upset about things you can’t change, just focus on what you can.” And that sounds like solid advice, but I have lost faith that I can change anything.

I don’t have the mental energy to get through my weekly obligations and have energy left for the things I want to do in life. And that only causes a feedback loop because back in 2012 or whenever I quit a job I hated with the intent to go back to school and find my path to a more creative career. Now, thirteen years later, I seem further from that creative career than I was then. My life now consists of trying to pay off a student loan for a degree I did not manage to get and trying to pay for a vehicle I only have because I need it for the job I have to pay off the student loans and the car I have for the job. And, of course, rent for an apartment where I have no choice, but if I go anywhere else I’m paying far more. I’m trapped in a cycle. And, as I get older, that distance from what I want to be doing and what I am doing makes me lose more and more sleep which just makes me more and more tired as I continue the cycle.

And I want it on the record, I have a three day weekend! It may not fall on the days I’ve repeatedly asked for, but it’s still three days off work every week. Most people don’t have that and most people seem to get by just fine, so I’m left assuming that I’m just broken in some important way. I don’t understand how other people get by. At least one friend of mine said it is alcohol that helps those people, but even if I wanted to start drinking (now would be a better time than ever before, I suppose) I also don’t understand how people can afford things like alcohol or cigarettes or the other addictive mollifiers that are so popular. I don’t understand how people manage to be people in general. Whatever training people got to get through life, I did not get. Or, as I said, I’m just broken.

Every week, creative stuff has to be the lowest priority on my schedule. There’s work. There’s fucking sleep. Anything else has to be crammed in the available slots. If I visit my friends or my family, that’s most of an evening gone, so I can’t do my creative projects. Especially when I visit my niblings. They may be the most important people I know, but it is simply exhausting for me to spend an evening with them. As a result my options are to NOT visit my friends and family, which isn’t a real option, or to do that instead of working on my stuff and then have a little resentment that I spent that time with loved ones. And even this was easier when I had my weekends falling on actual weekends…

Or suppose I want to relax by reading a book or watching a movie or, heaven forbid, playing a computer game. These are the things that actually make me feel less exhausted. But they still take time. If I spent a day playing a cool mystery game (like The Roottrees Are Dead, to name one I did during this depressive period) I come out of it feeling great, energized, ready to work on something of my own. I want to take that energy and channel it into something, but before I know it, my time off is over and that energy gets to be channelled into my job instead. So I resent playing games, or watching movies, or reading, because they aren’t what I want to do either.

I come to resent time spent cooking. I resent time spent cleaning. I resent time spent going for a nice walk or catching up on the news (okay, maybe that one I’d resent either way). Anything I have to do that isn’t being creative, I come to resent. And since all of that has to be prioritized above creativity, I wind up resenting everything I do. I have to do all that stuff and maybe by the end of the week I have one new page written, one new page for a colouring book, one more small whatever and then at the end of a few months like that I notice the year is almost over and I have ten pages of writing and three pages of a colouring book, and that isn’t enough. It’s not worth the exhaustion.

So these last few months, I’ve just given up. I don’t even work on that one page a week anymore. All my biggest project ideas are now revealed as pipe dreams. I still idly tinker on things, I don’t think I’d be physically able to stop that, but whatever it will take for me to get back to working on the things I want to work on is something I can not currently fathom.

Maybe I need someone to explain the secret of how humans live or maybe I need an end to fascism. Who can say?

People are complaining about how “woke” university students are again these days, because it turns out young people can actually care about things. Go figure! It’s a stereotype that has been around probably since there have been young people going to school and old people who think they know better than those “smart” kid, though of course the term “woke” wasn’t then what it is today. And it was certainly a stereotype that existed in 2012/2013 when I went back to school as an adult. Which is why one of my classes once disappointed me pretty badly.

I had assumed I had written about this before on the site, but I can’t find it. I’ve definitely written about it somewhere on the Internet, but for completeness sake I need it here too.

I think it was one of my first-year classes, one that focused on Popular Culture in general. It seemed like it’d be up my alley. There were probably a hundred or so students in the class, so sometimes it would be broken up into groups of three with my group being taught by a TA (and, I assume the other groups also being taught by TAs, maybe one by the actual professor, who knows, doesn’t matter). So my sub-group of the class was probably thirty-something large.

At some point the TA of my group did a poll of the class asking if we thought there was still a need for Feminism. I was the only one who raised a hand to say there was. Maybe that’s my memory playing tricks on me, it’s been more than a decade now after all. Maybe there was one or two others. But you know what there wasn’t? More than that. Where were all those stereotypical “woke” students I’d want to be learning alongside?

I was disappointed, but I rationalized it. It was a first-year class, these were the youngest kids, yet to learn much of the real world outside their high schools. And I also assumed that there were probably some who thought feminism is good, but were afraid to raise their hands in a class that clearly didn’t agree with them. Maybe if more of them had, hands would have gone up in great number. I’ll never know.

I wanted my fellow students to be the kind of care about feminism and anti-racism and bringing down the man and all that. But that batch wasn’t. Because I’m not that big on the dumb systems we all live under and I would love to believe that there’s a generation out there with energy who might be able to help change things.

Shame how the kids who actually are like that get treated.

At this point the city is teeming with students again, and classes have begun anew. I am not attending them, though. Intent on becoming financially stable, I am taking at least a year off of my schooling. This is the monetary saving that I should have before I quit my job to go back to school, but that I had not the forethought for.

I am a little sad that I won’t be in school (though if I can find some that fit into my schedule, I may sit in on some larger, easy-to-blend-into classes), but I was also getting pretty tired of all the stuff I hate about school too. Perhaps this break will allow me to refocus on the positives sides of schooling before I go fully hateful of the system, as I did back in my teenage years.

And also, maybe I’ll have more money when the year is over.

But I will to work on my education in my own way through this year. I have taken fifty books from my Unread Books bookshelf and set them aside in a pile. I plan on reading the heck out of all that pile before this time next year. Some are the kind of works of literature that could come up in my education. Others are not. Either way, it’s more reading than I’ve been able to do during a school year, which is generally close to none. Here goes.

Oh hey, I just remembered that I get marks for those classes I did. There weren’t many this year, but here they is:

Outlaw Tales: A-
The Vampire: B+
The Short Story: B+

There were also two classes I took that I dropped out of a few months in because I was feeling burned out. For these I’ve been given a “W” for “withdrawal” I assume, but the joke is on them because I still learned a bunch of stuff and didn’t even have to write any exams.

Popular Cinema: W
The Pirate and Piracy: W

The bigger news, though, is that I am probably taking at least a year off school. As mentioned, I have scaled down from a full-time student to a part-time student because balancing work and school has worn me out. But the consequence I had not foreseen about this plan was that I now have to start paying off my student loans already. In order to afford that, I need to work more. To be honest, I could probably use the break from school. This winter really got me down on it.

My 2014 Report Card
My 2013 Report Card

It’s been a while, let’s see what PDR is up to:

Okay, yesterday I wrote my last exam of the semester, so I haven’t got class again until the new year. This is nice, because I’ve been feeling kinda mentally exhausted lately. Last year I was doing seven days a week without a day off from both work or school, but I just can’t bring myself to do that again. I assume that this is all proof that I’m too old, but I don’t want to do that again. I’m only going to be a part-time student from this point onward.

I’ve also been off work for a little while for a reason I will likely expand upon in a later post. I’ll go back this weekend, but the time with less school and work has allowed me to be more productive at other things. Kip and I are still working on a project, which I mentioned last time, but which I am still being vague about.

In more noticeable news, I have started a new feature of the site: I am reviewing fictional beekeepers. I’ve done two so far and I hope to do about four or five more before classes start back up. Once busytimes begin anew, I’ll drop down to about one beekeeper review a month, essentially filling the gap I left when I stopped doing Canadian Heritage Moment reviews. (On that note, there are still a handful of those left that I haven’t reviewed. I’ll try to do them if inspiration ever strikes.)

Haiku!

Trouble from the moon.
Reverse astronauts are here
and they want our cash.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back at some point before January, though, because experience tells me that once school starts I’ll be silent for months.