What is it that keeps one up at night? What cruel trick is this, when the body and mind have to scream and fight all day to stay awake, only to lie there in defiance when night finally arrives?

My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and the room is so bright I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a second moon hiding in my closet. I can see the smudge on the far wall of my bedroom. Suddenly I have perfect vision, and my hearing has reached super-human strength. I can’t hear a bloody thing during the day, but now I can clearly make out someone shouting their dog’s name eight blocks away with my window closed. I try to clear my mind, but morose similes keep forming.

Life is like the mirror hanging on my wall. Keep examining it, and you’ll spend all your days watching yourself slowly get older.

I shouldn’t have eaten that sausage roll so late. Tomorrow, after I fall asleep at the wheel and the rescue crew drag my corpse out of my crumbled car, it will all be because of that sausage roll. Why do you have to take a nap when you eat too much in the afternoon, but you’re wide awake all night if you eat something too late? Why can’t we have a little consistency in the world?

Life is like my radio alarm clock, full of annoying personalities that speak out at the worst of times.

I really need to develop a proper sleeping schedule. I’m a zombie during the daylight hours, propelled forward only by the power of caffeine, and even that is starting to lose its effect. I actually tried to eat a small child’s brain earlier this week, but his mother arrived while I was still rubbing margarine through his hair.

Life is like a box of chocolates. Eat too many and you’ll develop type two diabetes and, if left untreated, you may lose a leg or die.

Friday night was my company’s postponed non-denominational winter party. It was great fun. They held it in a very nice hotel banquet room, and we were served a tasty meal: maple-glazed duck appetizer, sirloin steak Entrée, and a chocolate mango cream-puff concoction for dessert.

After the meal I took full advantage of the open bar. I’m not a lush, but I do like a bargain. Eventually the party shifted to a pub downtown, and I stumbled my way home about five hours past my bedtime. I wasn’t too badly hungover Saturday morning, but it felt like I must have tripped on my way home and scraped the inside of my throat on the asphalt. I think I may have been shouting a lot that night, but I’m not sure at what exactly. I guess I’ll find out how much of a fool I made of myself Monday morning. I do think the new girl at work was intrigued by my drunken high-pitched shrieking, though, like a siren call from an island of eunuchs.

Saturday I had two friends from Kamloops come to visit, and they brought their Xbox 360 and all of the equipment for Rock Band with them. After a quick Japanese dinner downtown, we went back to my place and rocked out all night long. They even forced me to sing. My neighbours must have thought a goat was being raped in my apartment that night.

This morning we had a quick brunch downtown, and then I saw them off. They were going to a bridal fair before leaving, but I decided to let them do that alone, as I would rather chew my own leg off and paint my naked self-portrait on the side of the parliament building with the bloody stub than enter a fair dedicated to weddings. But I do hope they enjoyed it…

All in all, a great weekend. Always nice to have friends come to visit.

The New Year. A time to look back on past accomplishments, or lack thereof, and begin forming new ambitions and lifestyle changes to promptly ignore.

2007 was a fairly quiet year for me. This was my first year after graduating university, so I really just worked. It’s easy to measure life’s progress in semesters and city moves and trips abroad, but it becomes a bit harder when you’re stationary.

I’ve become a much better programmer over the last year and feel like my career is on the right track, I’ve been living a lot healthier and continuing to slowly lose weight, excluding the last month, and I’m generally happier and more comfortable with myself than I’ve been in quite a while. So this year has been a good one, I’d say, in a quiet way.

I say I’m not really into resolutions, but I end up making them every year anyway, so I might just be in denial about that. I’d like to be someone who’s not into resolutions, but I enjoy setting goals, even if I don’t really plan to achieve them. So here are a few:

Get off the habit of snacking all the time. My boss bought me a huge box of cookies for Christmas, and I live alone, so I’ve pretty much been living off cookies for the last two weeks. I eat some when I get home, lose my appetite for dinner, and then end up snacking again later that night. It’s a delicious, vicious cycle. Sadly, when I went to visit my parents for Christmas and detox, they had bought the exact same box of cookies. It’s a global conspiracy.

Write more. Not just here in the weblog, but actual fiction. I have written a little over the last couple of months, which is a step in the right direction, but I need to take it more seriously. This has been my longest running failed resolution, going about 15 years strong now.

Travel. The only travel I did in 2007 was for work, so I’d like to go on a personal trip this year. I’m slowly getting my student loans paid off and my credit card debt under control, so I’ll have more freedom to do this soon.

Take my bike out at least once. I brought my bike to Victoria last summer, and it hasn’t left my apartment once. It is an interesting conversation piece, though.

Catch up on my reading list. I have a towering pile of books to read, and I’ve gone through a slight reading drought this last month, so I need to start getting through them. I’m going to try and stop buying new books until I’m done these, which should save me money, because I pretty much have enough unread books right now to last me the entire year.

Be open to new experiences. Maybe join a club or take a class in something I’m interested in. Just get out there and try new activities and meet new people.

I hope 2007 was a good year for everyone, and if it wasn’t, here’s to a clean slate!

I guess it’s time to start shopping for Christmas 2008 now?

It’s nice to be home for the holidays. I’ve never missed this town, but there are people here whom I miss dearly while away, so it’s great to see them.

I also got to see my dog again. I missed her. She even recognized me through the beard. My sister brought her Min Pins over for the day. They’re little bundles of concentrated evil. I’ve never understood the attraction of Min Pins, but their owners absolutely love the breed. To me they just seem wiry, cold, and cruel. They constantly act and look like a startled deer. Her dogs pretended to not recognize me, but I know they knew me. They were just using the beard as an excuse to freak out. Concentrated evil.

I forgot I would have to bring gifts back home, and I didn’t really pack accordingly. I received a lot of books this year. I think I’m going to have to carry another suitcase on the plane exclusively for books.

I also received a small briefcase containing a tear-apart golf putter. It’s a putter in three pieces that you screw into each other to make a whole putter, much like a professional billiards player does with his cue stick, but with a putter.

Yeah, it confuses me also.

All in all, it’s been a good trip. I’m here until Sunday, and most of my friends have abandoned me for work and vacations, so I should be able to get a good amount of reading done, at least.

I hope all of you had a good Christmas, if Christmas is your thing.

I started and finished my Christmas shopping today, excluding a few bits that I still need to pick up in Kamloops once I’m there. It may seem late to most people, but it’s right on time for me.

I’m not a big fan of the Christmas season. I’m a bit of a Scrooge, from his pre-haunting days, and I’m typically sick of all things red and green before December even rolls around. I could conceivably get into the spirit if everyone would wait until the week of Christmas before they started celebrating, but that’s just not going to happen.

I do enjoy visiting with family and friends in Kamloops, but that’s really it. Christmas, to me, is a time of pain and suffering and misery. Suffering through crowds of sweaty, overweight people in the shopping malls, cringing in pain whenever a terrible, high-pitched Christmas carol is blared in my direction, and wallowing in misery as everyone around me tries to hold me down and waterboard me with holiday cheer.

I moved to Victoria, British Columbia’s capital city and tourist haven, at the beginning of this year, and my apartment is close to the downtown core, so as an added bonus I get horse-drawn carriages full of tourists singing Christmas carols outside of my window. Unfortunately, the street is just a little too far away to be able to properly pour boiling water on them as they pass.

I don’t mind Christmas wishes, and even Christmas music, within a week of the holiday, but if you bring it up any earlier than that, I will hurt you. I’ve asked for a taser this year, and I will be using it next winter.

I spent a good part of the morning listening to idiot SUV drivers scraping their shiny rims on the curb while trying to park outside my apartment. I lead an exciting life, ladies and gentleman. This is but the tip of the iceberg.

I also spent that time thinking about where I am in life and where I’m going. I haven’t really felt like myself this last month. It’s hard to explain, but I just feel unsatisfied or unfulfilled or…bored, really. I think it has something to do with my current stationary state.

I’ve been living and working in the same place now for nearly a year. I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it’s really not, but this is the longest I’ve stayed still in the last five years. While at university, I was moving and starting new jobs every four to eight months. That may sound horrible to some people, but I had grown to really enjoy it. Every move, or new job, felt like a new chapter. Life always felt fresh and progressive. Since finishing my degree, I feel like I’m just drifting motionless. This is the first point in my life where I haven’t had a sketchy six month goal and a neatly-packaged four year goal. It’s a strange feeling.

Don’t get the wrong idea, my life is actually quite good right now. I really enjoy my job. I work in a fantastic, casual office that embraces creative solutions and produces results without much bureaucratic nonsense. I’ve made good friends here and have a decently active social life. I’m in better shape than I was in high school, which, to be truthful, isn’t really saying much. I have a single apartment in a nice part of town, so I have a calm, cozy place to live. All in all, everything is going quite well.

I just don’t have anything to strive for right now. I’ve met most of the goals I’ve been aiming at for the last decade. I still have career ambitions, and I’m learning a lot in my job, but advancement takes time and experience. Apart from working hard and continuing to learn, there’s nothing I can really do to speed up that process.

I’m not really excited about anything right now, nor am I unhappy with anything; I’m just mildly content. I’m medium, warm, neutral, gray. I’m floating in the middle of the pool, constantly out of arm’s reach of any side. Contentment was never one of my goals. It’s just watered-down joy. It halts momentum - a covered pit on the path to real happiness, and it’s easy to fall in and never get out again.

This contentment has left me in a creative slump. I’m uninspired, as you could probably tell from that manuscript introduction I posted. I’m in a position now to focus on personal projects. The path I was on this last decade was a ride. It was like a playground slide. Once I pushed off, I didn’t have to focus on moving myself forward. It was just a matter of stopping myself from falling over the sides. I guess now I just have to find a new slide and start climbing those steps.

I went to a doctor at the beginning of the week for a follow-up appointment about that abscess. I don’t have a regular doctor in this city, so I just use the walk-in clinic. Unfortunately, at these clinics, you never know who you’re going to get, and I tend to to be notoriously unlucky with doctors.

When last I visited, I was given Amoxicillin, had a swab taken, and was told to place a heating pad on the area a few times a day and to keep it wrapped in gauze. I had done that, and the wound was feeling much better, but the follow-up was just to be safe.

After sitting in the waiting room for half an hour, I was brought in to see the doctor, one I hadn’t met before. He asked me what the problem was, and I explained what had happened. Either the last doctor hadn’t written anything down in my file, or this man hadn’t read it. After dealing with him, I’m placing my bet on the latter.

I asked if the test results from the swab had come back, and he said he hadn’t seen anything about a test. I’m fairly sure the swab sample is taken to test for which bacteria caused the infection, allowing them to adjust the medication accordingly if needed. This seems like a fairly important safety check, but apparently he didn’t think so.

He asked to see the area, and immediately after I pulled off the gauze bandage he said, “An abscess can often be a sign of diabetes. That’s fine now, you can stop bandaging it. You’re cured, go home and have a shower.” Without another word, he left the office.

There are a number of reasons why I was dumbstruck by this:

1. He dropped the diabetes bomb and then left without any explanation. After researching it a bit and phoning my parents, who are both in the medical field, I’m not too worried about this. While it is apparently true that people with diabetes get abscesses more often, assuming someone could have diabetes from an abscess is a fairly large leap.
2. He just looked at it. He didn’t put gloves on and poke at it or ask me any questions about it, he just looked.
3. He told me to stop wearing a bandage on it and that I was cured, but the wound was still open. I’m not a doctor, but even I could see that it was most certainly not cured. You also don’t have to be a doctor to know that walking around with an open wound is not really a good thing to do, especially when it’s on an area that will rub up against your pants all day.
4. He left the office so abruptly that I couldn’t tell if the appointment was over or not. I didn’t know what he was doing. I spent the next few minutes standing there awkwardly, smelling myself because of the shower comment, before finding him in his administrative office and asking if we were done. On top of that, I had just showered an hour before seeing him, and I smelled mighty fine, thank you very much.

It occurred to me after leaving the clinic that he might have not even looked at the abscess. It seems like he just looked at the gauze bandage for signs of drainage instead. It’s possible that he assumed I hadn’t changed the bandage in the five days since my last appointment and, since the bandage was still in place, hadn’t showered. Upon seeing that there wasn’t much drainage on the bandage, he declared me cured. In reality, I’ve been showering, although awkwardly, and changing the bandage every morning.

Good thing I took time off work. I might have missed the chance to have a doctor completely brush me off. After leaving, I promptly discarded all of his advice, and I seem to be healing nicely.

I have this magical gift that allows me to find the stupidest doctors imaginable. If there’s a fool with an M.D. in the city, you can be sure I’ll track him down.

It’s been raining all weekend here. I’m quite happy about this, because it kept me from feeling like a lazy bastard for not getting out and being active.

This hasn’t been the best month for me. Near the beginning, I was ill for the first time in ages. Then last week, I had a wee bump on my thigh, which quickly developed into an abscess of pain and misery. It was inconveniently positioned, so it rendered me crippled. After a very slow hobble to the doctor, much pain, and antibiotics, I’m now happily on the road to recovery. Thankfully I can work from home, so I was able to spend the last couple days of the week stewing in my solitary anguish.

I’ve narrowed down the list of any minor changes to my life in the last couple of months to find what could be negatively affecting my physical being this way, which sadly only really amounted to three items: planning to take part of NaNoWriMo, rock climbing, and more actively trying to eat healthier, non-processed, organically-grown food.

I’m either allergic to leading a healthy lifestyle or potential creative endeavours.