I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

DRAWING IN CRAYON IS MURDER ON THE WRISTS...

Really, it is. I'm not kidding. It's because the crayons break in two so easily and you have to draw with those tiny stubs. I needed to rub Rub A535 (Capsaicin) on my right wrist just to make the pain go down. I can see why most creative-minded adults don't bother using crayons as an artistic option.

I have no idea how crayon artist Jeffrey Robert can do it so well.

I've taken a break from my crayon experiment for the evening, but, hopefully, I'll have something worth scanning tomorrow. But, as you can see from my sneak peek, I doubt that I'll abandon my Prismacolor coloured pencils for Crayola crayons... certainly not on a regular basis.



In other personal news, yesterday morning (blargh, had to get up at the inhumane hour of... 8 a.m.... feel sorry for me, please), I went for my second appointment with the psychiatrist that I saw in April. This time, my mother came in with me. She tried to make a stronger, more persuasive case, that I might have Asperger's, demonstrating the "flapping" I talked about the other time as an example of weird, repetitive actions, though what she showed him was kind of a (Brian from Family Guy voice) "I've done that, what? Like, maybe, three times in thirty-one years? Once a decade?" Okay, probably a fair bit more than that, but it's not something I remember doing nearly as much as she thinks, and, sometimes, I suspect that what she interprets as "flapping" is just me dealing with wrist cramps that I get a lot from drawing. She also mentioned that, while I've never been too comfortable in social circumstances, I do sometimes like being at least passively confrontational, by holding non-standard political views (by Canadian standards), carrying Canadian (and Quebec) flags on Saint Jean-Baptiste day (hey, I love Quebec, still a lot more than Ontario, I just don't like separatism), and wearing my stars and stripes shirt to piss off communists at Concordia. I'm not sure that's a sign of Asperger's, because the Asperger's sufferer says inappropriate things with no knowledge of the inappropriateness of it all, while what she mentioned is just examples of me acting like a "little bastard" for the fun of it. It's fun to piss on people's parades. And I know a fair bit about group psychology, so I do it in a passive confrontational way, where I can mildly piss off people without actually getting into direct confrontations. She probably made a relatively more convincing case than I did, and the doctor acknowledged the possibility that I could have Asperger's in addition to Social Anxiety Disorder, but I get the idea that he was far from convinced, and, right now, I'm leaning towards his view, that I'm too "interested" and "engaged" when I'm talking for it to be Asperger's.

Most of the appointment was having him fill out forms the government sent me, since the main purpose of the appointments is to officially get diagnosed with something, so I could get the assistance I honestly need to be a properly functioning adult. I'm not comfortable giving too many details here about the exact nature of the assistance I'm getting, but, while, in the short term, it's to help us get through a particularly rough patch, in the slightly longer term, it's to help me get a job, because I'm a smart guy and should have no difficulty functioning in most jobs, I'm just, because of my Social Anxiety Disorder and my lack of experience at 31 years of age, shit poor at selling myself and need someone else to vouch for me. I'm also hoping to get into Carleton University with the help I need to help me focus better, because I'm the sort of guy that probably could have been in an Ivy League school on a scholarship a decade ago, or, alternately, could have had my dream cartoon about the kick-ass fighting flight attendants on television 5 years ago, but I've never been able to focus at most things long enough to turn my potential into reality. Except for blogging, and I don't say this often but I am amazed that I have kept this up for over three years with hardly any breaks of longer than a few days, but that hasn't gotten me any money, fame, or credentials. I keep doing it because I enjoy it, but I'm not nearly a significant enough blogger for it to have any bearing on my station in life, so, ultimately, I'm spinning my wheels here for the sake of being semi-entertaining to a few dozen regular readers.

Not that it bothers me, I'm just sayin', that's all.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:43 PM