By Lucy

Everyone knows about Pavlov’s dogs, but there are other studies on dogs that form the basis of our understanding of human psychology.

One study, which I can’t track down and possibly imagined, was that if you placed a small mammal in a padded room since it was young and it never experienced any kind of pain, when it did experience pain it would suffer a lot more because it hadn’t developed any coping mechanisms. I always use that to explain why I have anxiety and I avoid conflict. I was isolated so much in my childhood that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn how to deal with such common pains, and it’s not been a boon to me.

The second study was done by Martin Seligman in 1967. They’d put dogs in a box where they could jump over a low wall to avoid a shock and the dogs would quickly learn to do so. Then they changed it so that no matter what the dogs did, they would always receive a shock. Eventually the dogs reached a point where they wouldn’t try to escape being shocked anymore, even if they reset the box so they could. This is where we get the term “learned helplessness”.

The only way for the dogs to re-learn to try and flee the shocks was if the experimenters physically picked up the dogs and showed them avoiding the shock was possible. Which says a lot about why people in abusive relationships and depressing life situations don’t try to change it.

Worth noting is that a small number of dogs refused to stop trying to escape the shocks no matter what. The experimenters dubbed this “psychotic optimism” and it’s about the only reason I can think of for why I am the little engine that could, radiating sunshine all the time.

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I forgot to mention two things last post. The first is that on the drive back from Dryden my check engine light came on. I panicked, pulled over and checked all the obvious causes. Finding nothing, I finished driving back to Thunder Bay in a panic and had the garage clear the code the next day. They charged me 100$ to plug a USB into my car and told me it was the code for the broken grill again. They then told me it’ll cost 1’200 to fix. So 1’400 dollars because I hit a bird! Christ.

The second thing is that I bought my worm bin! So now I have a worm bin.

Friday morning, after I finished my usual morning routine, I went down to the storage locker to finally change my tires. I’d been putting it off cuz my arms are weak after the long hours, but I couldn’t any longer, even if I didn’t really feel better. I could get called in to work at the mill any day now and then I’d be out of time.

It did not go well. Partially because instead of using a proper tool, I’d been using the tire iron that came with my spare tire and it was looking less like a hexagon and more like a circle. But also partially because I think Hanuman broke my torque wrench.

For people who aren’t ‘handy’, the first revolution of a lug nut is called “breaking” it. You can’t break nuts with a torque wrench. It breaks the torque wrench. But there’s no easy way to test a torque wrench, so I couldn’t be sure either way.

After I screamed and swore my way through 2 tires, I looked up breaker bars. They’re around 30 bucks, but I found a torque wrench/ breaker bar kit on sale for 100 dollars at Canadian Tire, so I decided to splurge for that. Emily told me it’s only 3.50 for the bus and a ten minute ride to Intercity, so I decided to throw my tires in the back seat and limp my car home and leave it until I could get to Canadian tire the next day.

In the evening, Kevin came to pick me up for our not-date at the movies. We went to finally go see Sinners!

I really liked Sinners. It felt a little clunky – the ending goes on and on and on – but it was definitely worth seeing. Music is woven through the heart of it, especially the crowning sequence of Sammy summoning the past and the future and how the music and tempo shifts and changes. I also loved that it’s a movie by black people, about black people. About Jim Crowe, sharecropping, the “one drop” rule, the way we have prevented minorities from making a better life for themselves while complaining about them not doing better for themselves. Michael B Jordan knocks every movie out of the park and I love the depth of his movies and acting. Strong recommend.

As we went out into the parking lot, I stopped and looked up at the darkening sky. “This is where we met!” The CLE.

Kevin paused for a moment before it clicked, “Oh, yeah!”

So long ago, the day the Vagabond broke up with me. And I got my palm read and turned around and Kevin was there.

Maybe it sounds corny, but the fortune teller told me I was going to meet my next beau “soon” and I thought, even that day, she meant Kevin. But I had some healing to do first.

It was such a dramatic turnaround in my life; from hiding in the darkened living room to suddenly sailing all the time.

I’m very glad I met Kevin and Chris at that time. They kept me moving and too busy to fall back into my old patterns, and I think Kevin knows it. I see a lot of small ways where he meets me where I am, instead of where other people want me to be.

Saturday morning, I got up early and hopped on the first bus to Intercity. One of the bolts was stripped, so I went to the auto shop first to grab a box of spare bolts. The guy behind the counter recognized me from the pow wow the year before (and still has a crush on me, it seems) so we chatted for a minute.

Grabbed my tool set, walked back to the bus and made good enough time that it counted as a transfer and I didn’t have to pay for the return trip. Had a snack and went out to work on the car.

I unpacked all my tools, admired my new breaker bar, and was in the process of jacking up the car when an older man came over.

“Are you… using a scaffolding wrench on that jack?”

Yes, yes I was. What, it’s fast and I’m used to it!

His name is Earl and he offered me use of his impact gun, which I appreciated, although any time it saved was eaten up by constant chatting. He works in “flow”, which is adamantly not HVAC, or so he insists. I was also amused that as he walked away to get his impact gun, he yelled behind him “this isn’t because you’re a girl”, to which I replied, “I hear that a lot”. Because I do hear it a lot and it’s almost never true or you wouldn’t feel the need to tell me.

Eventually I managed to tear myself away, have some lunch, drop off my tires at the storage locker and head down to the boat. Late. I hate being late.

For the work on the boat, we re-installed the rudder. They had a new mechanism inside the hull milled, which meant me and the guy installing it had to shove ourselves into the crawl space to install it. But mostly there was a lot of sitting around, so at 4 I bounced and went to pick up Jeremy.

I had to go shopping and his shopping is limited to whatever he can fit into his backpack when he walks up the street to Metro, so I drove him down to Superstore and told him to fill up the back seat of my car. You could tell he had never been to Superstore and was lost for a minute, but he eventually figured it out and loaded up a shopping cart.

“Is this all together?” The clerk asked, ignoring the divider I placed between our groceries.

“Nope, just taking my little brother shopping!”

She frowned at our apparent lack of resemblance. Spoilsport.

Alrighty, time to code!

Coding for games is easy once you are in to it. The real problem is that coding is so different from every other task in existence that you will be hopelessly lost and do everything wrong at first. For example, you might have an idea, in carpentry, that you hit a nail with a hammer, even if you’re not sure how all the bits go together. In coding, you have to decide what program to use, which tools mean what and also which are hotkeys (meaning there is no toolbar for them), basically that you have no idea what the hammer, nails and wood even look like to begin with.

Why do I know how to do these things? As ever, it comes back to cancer. When I realized I wasn’t going to die and I had to do something again, but was still too sick and depressed to leave the house, I shoved a better graphics card into my PC and started learning how to 3D model.

That’s… about as far as I got, actually. But it’s all I really needed, cuz very few people entirely make a game from start to finish, and if they do it’s usually 2D or something else low rez. I had an idea that I might make a few high-quality models and post them around hoping to be hired on as a game dev, but then reality crashed, so this was fortuitous.

We spent the afternoon working on workflow, ironically. Jeremy set up a LAN server so that we could easily send files back and forth. Pinned a list of things to do.

We capped the evening by watching an episode of Breaking Bad. It’s… fine. I wouldn’t watch it by myself; the scene at the end when Skyler disinterestedly jerks him off while playing poker on her laptop absolutely would have killed it for me, if it wasn’t for having Jeremy next to me to take the piss out of it. But then that is Bryan Cranston and his reputation for doing absolutely anything the director asks of him. The show is critically acclaimed for a reason, a dive into the dark side of the soul, one man’s decent in hubris and cancer, but I could do without those bits. Like the cringey sex scenes in Napolean because they’re “real”, I’m not even asking for a slickly-shot “lovemaking” sequence. The guy’s marriage is a shambles, I can infer that, just leave it out!

Sunday morning.

There’s been some friction in the apartment. I don’t want to get into it cuz I don’t want to air my friend’s dirty laundry, but it is making me anxious to the point that I’m debating moving back in to where I was living before.

At 1 I went down to the boat to help Chris again. He was in the clubhouse having lunch, so I walked around the waterfront taking pictures of the mill across the river.

I feel torn helping him with the boat; on one hand, I appreciate that there is a time crunch. On the other, I’m still tired from shutdown and I have so many other things I have to do in my personal life. Sue even took me aside and told me to firm with him about my time commitments because I guess it was that obvious.

He had me install the bilge pump, I guess cuz I’m handy and my dad is an electrician makes me qualified. It was pretty simple to install. He offered me cable connectors, but I just used a pocket knife and electrical tape like dad would have done.

I was on the verge of heading out when Chris explained that the keel of the boat is solid lead and he had some half-baked plan to fix some damaged spots by using a grinder with a metal blade to grind it down. Using a cloth mask and no safety glasses.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen, but I knew I couldn’t let him hurt himself with the grinder (or expose himself to lead dust). So I took the grinder away from him, slapped on my dust mask from work, and tried it myself.

Not much, actually. Lead is a “soft” metal with a low melting point, which makes it easy to work with in a respect. Ironically, the grinder did very little to the keel because it was spinning so fast it was melting the lead, which wasn’t what we wanted it to do. Like cutting bread, you need a slow, serrated blade to cut lead, or a ball-peen hammer to reshape it (I asked someone else later).

I pushed later than I felt comfortable and then went to Jeremy’s. Chris mentioned they were working on the boat the next day, but I was tired and just wanted a day with no obligations.

When we settled down for our evening meal and watching Breaking Bad, I made a half a cup of brown rice and had that with my Factor meal. It’s hard to break keto – it makes you literally sick if you do it wrong. You gotta go gently on the carbs, increasing about 10 grams a day, and trying to stick with complex carbs like brown rice.

I got tired of Keto partially because of Factor. The last week of meals, they were offering exciting entrees like “beef with cabbage”. As in, they were replacing beef in the meals with cabbage and selling it for the same price.

See, I have a problem when companies are sneaky about certain things. Prices go up and not every company wants to put their prices up. Shrinkflation has always been a thing; every time Gatorade tells you they have an exciting new design for the bottle, you lose 15 mls in volume, but the price stays the same. And that’s fine, who’s gonna notice 15 mls? But other things annoy me because they fundamentally change the product. Like the canned pumpkin puree, Ed’s. They responded to rising prices by removing olive oil from the recipe and substituting water. I stopped buying the product immediately because it ruined the first thing I made after that change, because water and oil are not substitutions for each other! I would have been fine paying more money for the same product, but I can’t use it at all without olive oil in it!

So the same for Factor. I get it, the price of beef is going up and I’d pay for that, but I’m not going to pay for a beef dish that it mostly cabbage. I can make that myself.

I was also just craving fruit in general. Probably a good thing?

Monday morning started with a text; “Are you available?”

So it begins.

They told me to come in on Tuesday, but I told them on no uncertain terms that I was busy Tuesday and I’d come in Wednesday.

Apparently this year they are doing the mandatory orientation online. Jeremy woke up at 8 and declared he was going back to bed ’til noon, but I managed to convince him to let me come over and then he could sleep while I typed away. I rushed to pack and head over for 9. I could listen to the orientation while working on the tedious work.

As I listened to the generic health and safety lady prattle on in the background, I painted black lines on my pure white birch trees and tried not to think about which task was more mind numbing.

Then I turned to creating my “images-as-planes” branches, at right angles to each other to give the illusion of 3D. Trees straight out of the N64.

Around noon Jeremy surfaced, had a shower and ate breakfast.

A doctor called me. Apparently someone (probably the doctor investigating my mysterious lumps) referred me to some other internal medicine specialist about my anemia. Be nice if someone told me I had another referral, but I’ll take it. Even before my first surgery I was plagued by anemia and low blood pressure, which is why it’s always so annoying when doctors write it off as a side effect of my cancer. She seemed fixated on the idea of it being internal bleeding, even though I’ve had internal bleeding before and I’m not experiencing any of the symptoms. Whatever, if she wants to scope me top to bottom to satisfy herself, I probably need a scope anyway. Since I missed last year’s.

After lunch I decided I needed a few more things from the store, so I borrowed Jeremy’s backpack and walked up to Metro.

Strawberries! I was practically drooling.

I walked past something labelled “sugar mango”. What is a sugar mango? Basically, someone turned a mango into an apple; they selectively bred it until the skin is soft enough to eat (personally, I didn’t find it any sweeter than a regular mango, so I’m not sure about the name). I grabbed 2, one for me and one for Jeremy. A handful of golden kiwis, since I know it is kiwi season in New Zealand and they are likely to be fresh. And a few other odd and ends.

I made moussaka for dinner again, snacking on strawberries as I cooked and as I worked on the computer. Before I knew it, the container was empty and I had a stomach ache from carb overload. Oops.

We encountered a few coding problems. One is that apparently there is a known issue with textures and shaders transferring from Blender to Godot, which I find baffling. It rendered the shape of my trees properly but not my painstakingly painted black and white lines!

The second is that the windshield of the snowmobile is oddly warped in Godot, but there’s nothing I can do about that because the model itself is fine.

Kev dropped by at one point to pick up my old lightning charger and headphones, which I don’t need because the new iPhones use USB-C. He asked me if I was going to be at bowling on Friday.

“Bowling on Friday?” I turned and looked at Jeremy.

“I forgot to tell you.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of weird how they created a new group for it. Why didn’t we just use the old group chat?” Kev mused aloud.

Well, I’m willing to be the short answer is that someone didn’t want me invited. Jeremy and Kev insisted I was invited regardless, so I guess we’ll find out.

Tuesday morning me and Paul went out for breakfast, as he already had to be in town to donate blood (yay!). He was a little woozy and out of it from having all his blood drained, but he perked up as his blood sugar came back. We’d had some plans for a photoshoot that I scrapped when I got called in to work, but we went to ReStore and walked around a bit and had a good laugh at some of the things on sale. I bought a small wheelie chair so I wasn’t hunched over Jeremy’s kitchen table in a dinning room chair.

Went home and changed into my nice clothes and waited in the parking lot for Chris and Sue.

I’m joining Rotary.

They meet at the university, which is walking distance for me but of course, then I’d have to find the location within campus. Being shown once is much easier. After we parked and walked in, we walked past a bright blue motorcycle being given a ticket.

They had a catered spread. You have to pay for it normally, but the club was covering my fee for today. Which was unfortunate, because I had had 2 breakfasts today, one when I got up and one with Paul, and I wasn’t really hungry, but I grabbed some soup and finger foods so as not to be rude.

Chris introduced me to a few people, and a few I remembered from when I had been brought to volunteer at the soup kitchen. Chris and Sue settled at a table, but I’d hazard that Chris didn’t bring me here to hide out at our table. He wants me to mingle, so I got up and went over to a table with a gentleman who works for the university. I was hoping he’d know Yolanda’s daughter, but he doesn’t. Funnily enough, the table also included the president-elect, who owns the bright blue bike and who seemed quite keen to get to know me.

One thing that started to annoy me as the meeting went on was how everyone seemed to like the idea of recruiting members from the trades, while not understanding that taking a long lunch is something unique to suits. I couldn’t imagine telling the foremen that I wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours to attend a Rotary meeting at midday. They’d laugh me off site!

As I talked to other members, I also started to get a sense that Chris is a bit of a kingmaker in the club. People seemed to expect great things of me because he recruited me. They had also moved the on-boarding process for everyone to today’s meeting to accommodate my schedule, although no one said it out loud.

I had a thought that it would be nice to recruit Kev to the club. He’s suits-adjacent, service-minded and active.

The on-boarding was smoother than the Soroptimists. I was presented a slickly put-together binder, with a manual, pin and stickers, and here I was still waiting on my Soroptimist pin! They called all the new members up to the front – there were 3 of us – had our sponsors give a brief speech about our achievements, and then the president-elect pinned the pins onto our lapels.

“Would you like to say anything?” The speaker asked.

“I, um… as I was travelling around New Zealand, I kept seeing signs. For Rotary meetings, for works they had completed, all the good they do. And I thought… this is where I want to be.” I smiled, “Thanks for letting me join you.”

The room broke into applause.

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After the meeting, they dropped me off back at my place so I could change into painting clothes.

I wasn’t sure what I expected for painting the boat, but I wasn’t expecting what we got. The paint label warned that it is toxic without explaining why, so I looked it up. Turns out it has cartoonishly high levels of copper, which allows it to increase the speed of the boat up to ten percent… somehow. I know copper has a lot of uses, but I didn’t think “decreasing surface tension” was one of them. It’s not even legal to buy in Canada anymore, although I don’t imagine there’s anything particularly illegal about bringing it across the border or using it, it made me feel icky. Especially since Chris’ disregard for the potential toxicity of it meant he didn’t have proper protective gear. I helped him and Michelle paint about half the boat and then my nerves got the better of me and I ducked out. I get enough heavy metal and toxin exposure are work… I don’t need it in my private life as well.

On the way home, I stopped at the store. I’d loved the liver pate at Glenorchy and my dizzy spells were becoming a problem, why not try going all in on it? The store was fresh out of beef liver, but they had some pork liver left and I don’t think there’s much of a difference. When I got home I fried it up and threw it in a blender with the other ingredients. Liver is the bloodiest thing to cut up, probably cuz it keeps getting described as “spongey”.

The pate itself was fine. It probably could have been improved with brandy, but I didn’t want to buy a bottle just for the shot I’d need for my pate.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Tomorrow I go back to the den of wolves.