I've come this far... and here comes more!

Let's go back to the beginning, as in, the beginning of this blog, nearly four years ago. What were my stated goals?

~ Procure a suitable laboratory.

~ Rebuild MAL 9000 and install him in the new lab.

~ Earn my Ph.D -- before someone discovers my twisted and malevolent schemes!

~ Start a blog. (Well, at least I have that one taken care of.)

In the intervening years I have, to my great surprise and relief, done all of those things, except for my Ph.D. Of course, I didn't really expect to get it in one year, but of course I did start college within that year, which is the first step, thanks to superhero/rock star/now-fiance Lou Ryan.
` Before that, I'd never really gone to college -- besides a couple art classes where I didn't learn anything -- and had had no other education to speak of up until I started college at EVCC.

That was rough because, not only did I not know how to study and be in public, but I was constantly prevented from learning because I'd lost my lab and had some very frightening and stressful living situations in which I had to constantly be on-guard, and could go for months at a time with no breaks for basic human needs such as quiet and privacy.
` Homework was something that I was constantly being prevented from doing, and completing it became an impossible, but crucial goal to my success.
` At the worst of it, I became suicidal from having to go back to 'survival, no-brains, no-personality, fight-or-flight mode' all the time, and being picked on for this by people who took advantage of this and used me as a taxi service among other things.
` It was a huge interruption in my exponentially-fast learning of life skills -- which I had been prevented from before because of being abused and tortured and then treated like an invalid by people like Phil -- and the fact that I didn't have these skills already was also a source of ridicule.

So, it's understandable that I wasn't able to get many schemes underway after I began having psychotic loser roommates and living in seriously ghetto conditions -- in fact, I wound up hating myself and feeling incompetent because I was constantly being traumatized and abused, which was something I'd grown up with and was trying to break out of the habit of being a victim of.
` Finally, that's worked, it's just taken that long to get away from such people and situations.

How my life has changed, and changed, and changed again!

And speaking of my first post, I've just gone back to it -- January 1, 2006, and I've found that... MY READER'S COMMENTS ARE BACK!!!!
` It was some time ago, when I was going through the task of re-archiving my blogs (because I had failed the first time) and found that almost every single post up to certain points (apparently the points which I'd installed those comment spam guards) had removed all the previously-made comments from them!
` But now, having just gone back to the first post again, I've found that ALL MY COMMENTS ARE BACK!
` Oh, the memories! All my bloggy friends at the time, and others, including crazy people, and all their witty comments and whatnot -- just the comments were like half my blog posts, and sometimes, were even better! I feel so relieved!

Well... it's time to re-archive my blog posts on my new MAL, and with the comments, now, which will probably take forever but it's worth doing in case my blogs 'disappear' online, which happens to some people occasionally, like poor Aaron, whose blog was gone with no explanation!

Anyway, so what are my plans, once more?

Well; I've changed my opinions in light of new facts so many times that it is hard to see across to those days when I wrote those posts. Too many things have happened.

So, I think it's time I paid those days a visit!

Not only do I have some new posts started, but I've learned so many things that I realize I've made many factual errors in this blog -- and others -- that I think that as I go back to archive this blog, I should also re-write the same posts, for the good of anyone who looks at them, and for material to put on The Corrigendopedia website, which I am now writing for once more.

I've been planning for this for a long time, but it's been hard to get back to serious blogging because of school and other busy activities and working at getting my sh** together so that I can do more than just that.
` I've said many times in the past that I would be back at blogging, but just when I thought I'd had my life under control, I'd find out that I was wrong and would get blamed for that, even though it was more bad luck and getting beaten down constantly that was the problem, and I still blamed myself, especially when Lou Ryan didn't see the problem and encouraged this.

That doesn't happen too often now, although something of this kind did happen last night:

One of the things I've been working on is going to bed early so that I can get up before ten in the morning, but it is so cold at night without firewood to heat the house that I'm so tense from shivering under my blankets that I can't get to sleep.
` So, yesterday I got up at 6:30 in the morning to shoot a really elaborate TV commercial and didn't get home until evening, and then went to the gym, and I was so happy to be exhausted for once because finally, I would be able to get to sleep early, no matter how cold it was.

Lucas had also put the fan heater downstairs by the fireplace so as to blow hot air towards the stairs and throughout the house in the same way as he would put the mini-fan by the fireplace when we did have a fire going. It worked almost as well, but was much more expensive.
` For some reason, it seemed as though I was very cold and couldn't warm up. I shivered and sat on my feet and wondered why Vada and the kitten, Rusty -- whom I have because Violet died -- wasn't there to help keep me warm.
` Instead of investigating, I fell back into my habit of just blaming myself for my problems. If I couldn't fall asleep, it was my fault, I thought. It couldn't actually be that much colder than it was the previous night, because the fan heater had worked then.
` Besides, I was too exhausted to get up and investigate -- I'd seen the heater on before going to bed, and I knew that none of the roommates would turn it off because it was heating the house, so it must be working. If I felt cold, it must be all in my head, right?
` That's just destructive thinking, and I admit I fall back into that habit as soon as I'm really tired or otherwise mentally taxed and am experiencing some trouble or other. Which I was.

If I'd just spent two minutes actually using my problem-solving skills, I would have found differently:

I didn't get to sleep until the wee hours, and as usual woke up the next morning at ten, feeling discouraged that I had not been able to utilize my morning to do everything I needed to do in the morning and then have the entire rest of the day in front of me.
` Even worse, a friend here at the house, Anthony Soto, was in the living room and called me something like 'Gotten-Up-Late Hair' because I hadn't been able to comb my hair into shape from all the tossing and turning, and I explained to him that I had gotten up late because I hadn't been able to sleep from the cold last night.
` But then, Lucas -- I mean, Lou Ryan -- came onto the scene and told me what had happened last night, just after I had fallen asleep:

He had been asleep in bed, and despite wearing his sweats, with his hood up, even, he was so cold that he woke up and got out of bed and discovered that the entire house was freezing! He went downstairs and found that the heater-fan was gone!
` A few seconds later, he found it in the den, with the door closed, and he said it was about ninety degrees in there. He swore a bunch and turned on the light, to find Anthony -- and a girl! -- in the bed in the den!
` He had stole our heat! So, I was right to think that our roommates hadn't done anything with the heater. What we didn't know was that Anthony was spending the night -- I'm not sure why -- and this is why it's always important to use your critical thinking skills, even when your critical thinking centers want to rest -- especially then!

Not only was it my anti-victim mentality, but Anthony who had caused me to ultimately wake up in the morning late, and then the same guy teased me for it!

CORRECTION: It wasn't Anthony, it was JOEL! As a roommate, Joel ought to have known better! I guess he just doesn't think that much, but he's eager to learn.

It is bizarre, but once-in-a-lifetime flukes have pretty consistently interfered with my life over these four years, many times in critical periods where I had absolutely needed to exercise some control and gain some self-confidence:
` This includes everything from de-brainwashing and de-traumatize myself (no thanks to the 'mental health' non-psychologist idiots) and being in a state of vulnerability state because I was opening myself to the possibility of learning something scary but necessary for my continued development, all the way to more common difficulties such as changing my bad habits through discipline.
` I'd be in some critical period or moment when something bizarre that I couldn't have seen coming that was unpleasant, painful, or just plain discouraging, would happen.

This is just one example -- however, since this doesn't happen every day anymore, I believe that it is so little that, while it is upsetting, I can take this level of discouragement and continue on trying to take control of my life without having to be too afraid to try again for some time.

And thus, I believe that I am in a better position to be more consistent with my blogging and other activities.
` Although outside, unpredictable factors out of my control will always interrupt me, as long as they are not virtually constant (as they literally once had been, with the constant mind-deafening noise of the Su Chiang house of condemned doom, for example, when I had to literally leave the house and trudge down the street in the snow or rain, in order to find those abilities I thought I'd been developing, such as focusing, planning, thinking about things, remembering who I am, etc. but was not able to use those abilities or continue developing much more at all), I really think I can deal with these problems now.
` Only looking at it now do I realize how delicate I've been, and how wrong it was for others to laugh at me when I told them what my needs were -- privacy and quiet -- in order to, not just make progress, but to stop backsliding into habit and unthinking, mindless oblivion of hanging on and hoping that I'd be able to come up for a breath of having my mind to myself, and at the same time being hurt by the way-too-high expectations of myself that I, and especially others, held.

But now, I've gone through many more childhood developmental stages, which I had been prevented from going through before, we've gotten rid of abusive ass****s living in our house and in our lives, plus I have been able to put myself together and set my life up so that discipline is no longer equated with a mental (or even physical) gauntlet of certain intense pain and disruption.

Therefore, I should be able to run a simple blog -- or even a set of four. And why four blogs?

When I started my first blog, I had been writing so many blog posts each day that I would often have two or three in one day. When I finally decided to be true to myself and blog with my true identity, here, I was able to shunt some of those extra blog posts over so that the other blog wasn't as clogged with writing.
` Then, once I was able to get my art online, consistently, I started an art blog so that the posts I had specialized for my artwork could all be in one place. Then, it just sorta got out of control.

My mission now is to get all that stuff back under control. I'll write/fix my websites, get my blogs going, figure out what to do with all the unpublished drafts and so on.
` It's going to take a lot of work, but now that my life is so much better and improving, I don't doubt that I can figure out how to do it, even when I have homework to do.