You're saved, bro!

Through 10 blogs switches, 9 were directly religious, meaning there was a direct scriptural quote in the title of the blog, the first post, or the first three lines of the post. WTF? When did everyone become so hardcore? Of the roughly 20 people I know and interact with regularly, two of them are religious, and they’re very quietly so. Yet all 20 are active Internet users (which really, isn’t everyone?), yet my random sampling showed a far greater concentration of outspoken religious bloggers than you’d think.

And I’m ok with that. It’s just that everything these 9 people blogged about had to be dragged back to the Lord. They couldn’t have a good day without being “blessed”, couldn’t cite a challenge without also appending a bible verse to it. It doesn’t exactly make for interesting reading. Can you imagine if someone talked like that in day-to-day life? “Well, I was super-disappointed that Starbucks was out of scones, but as Psalms 34:18 tells us, ‘The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’” Nope, friendship cancelled, lack of interest.

Maybe it’s some (un)conscious effort to score cred? An outlet for all those who are deeply faithful but not to the extent that they’re comfortable preaching to those they know – a way to demonstrate their willingness to spread the word without losing their RL friends? Whatever it is, it’s discomfiting. The comfortable distance that the Internet gives us seems to make angels or demons of us all – maybe there’s no middle ground.

Of course, I’m sure at least 4 of those 9 bloggers had a “normal” blog they keep updated for their friends, and give the religious address to their families. Why pigeonhole yourself?

I don’t form relationships well, or easily. I have problems expressing my feelings – I’ve always held everything all in. It makes it hard to be with me, I imagine. I’ve always tried to make people understand the depth of my feelings, but just telling someone how you feel isn’t enough, when they can’t see your emotions on your face, and in your gestures. Which made it all the more surprising that Shimi picked me.

She was so small when we first got her – tiny enough to fit in one of my hands, with a thin, ratty tail and a squinty eye from kittenhood sickness. She has hard to love, too – among her brothers and sisters, she was the one least interested in being friends or cuddling; all she ever cared about was exploring and fighting. But we picked her anyway. When we brought her home she was a typical terror; whole days would pass where you’d barely see her. She had other agendas than we did, and with her size, the apartment was on such an enormous scale that she could hide away forever, if she wanted.

She moved straight into a thick-necked, aggressive teenage phase, where she openly hated being touched, fought constantly with Chunk, and tore holes into (and crawled into!) the underside of our mattress, forcing long detente discussions with her as we attempted to extricate her. Heather openly discussed the idea of setting her back out for adoption – she clearly wasn’t attached to us. And I even felt the same way, sometimes. But I was starting to feel the tidal pull of that which didn’t want to be loved – like me, I knew Shimi “lived a rich inner life”; she didn’t give a shit what others thought and was living the way she wanted.

When we moved, Shimi moved with us. And she began to grow, too – a little less stand-offish, a little more interested in us. When we’d leave rooms, she’d follow silently behind, never relaxing until we settled in for good. When she’d lose sight of both of us, she’s start asking “questions” – inquisitive meows that she’d repeat until someone called for her, and then she’d dash to follow your voice, often meowing again in satisfaction when she’d locate us. We’d hold whole conversations, where she responded to every question with interested rebuttals, and we’d laugh helplessly. In the mornings, she’d wake me up before my alarm to get me moving, and she’d wait until I stepped out of the shower and luxuriously stretch up to touch my shoulders in a hug.

For the first time, I had a pet who was attached to me – while I’d play on the computer, she’d climb in my lap and purr contentedly, for hours. She curled up for naps next to my head as we’d watch movies, and fit herself into the small of my back as I slept at night. She was immortal – among our respiration-challenged pug and our exotically ailed Chunk, she seemed invulnerable to anything. Until she wasn’t anymore.

It was easy to tell she wasn’t feeling right. I picked her up and set her down one time that day, and instead of standing, she collapsed right to a laying position. We had to retrieve her with difficulty from under our bed later, and brought her to the emergency vet. After aggressive treatment she had rebounded, but when we came to see her the next evening, just to tell her goodnight, they told us we would be saying goodbye instead.

It’s amazing how something so small could take up so much room – for weeks there were so many empty spaces in our house that it didn’t feel like our home anymore. And of course, all you can think of is the things you should have done – how I should have seen her acting differently sooner – all the times I impatiently pushed her from my lap because I was too busy – all the times I shut her out of our bedroom so she wouldn’t wake me so early in the morning. Every day I come out of our room and look at the spot at the end of the hall where she would sleep, waiting all night with her eyes on our door, to be the first to greet me, stretching her paws to the top of the pet gate and meowing good morning.

Sashimi Voorhees, my special girl

When I found myself aimless and floundering after a disastrous first semester in college, my then-girlfriend-and-now-wife suggested that I needed to find a purpose in life – a plan. She had always dreamed of journalism, and in the same vein, had made her own newsletters as a child to distribute among family. In looking at my life, it was clear that my two driving passions, gaming and reading, came to the same thing – I’ve always considered video games an unrecognized but legitimate new narrative style, just a new way of telling old stories. So I set out to become a writer.

Sadly, it probably won't surprise you that it's way easier to find an image for "dragon and girl" than for "sleeping at dinner".

The problem was, I had only written very limited short stories before – my longest 17 pages long, and focusing on a farmgirl who could, inexplicably, swordfight, and had found a baby dragon that let her teleport when she said its name. And it’s name was Phelindrya. Even now I want to punch myself in the stomach. Luckily, I understood the awfulness of my prose at the time and hid this disaster from everyone, but still, it was an inauspicious start.

I continued with short stories and threw myself into creative writing classes, drawing on the muses of my childhood, when, by all accounts, I had been extremely creative and driven. I began to research magazines and journals that would accept unsolicited work, and submitted two stories to the NDSU journal. I received positive feedback and guidance from professors I respected.

What made me give up that dream, and happily, was reading what I wrote. I could absorb myself in the process and come out on the other side with something I couldn’t stand to wade through. And I didn’t see much improvement over time. If I couldn’t write something that I myself would enjoy, how could I ever succeed? My creative fire seemed to have burned down pretty low since childhood.

Unlike programming, my neglected white whale, it was easy to turn my back on writing. I loved reading, and will always continue to do so. But I’ll leave the material to people who deserve to produce it.

We were a little more lively after two hours passed - but not a lot.

Until I met my wife, of course. 

Heather’s never been accused of being patient. She’s frenetic and lively and always has multiple things going on, which is antithetical to the whole calm-and-collected thing. When she was first subjected to our leisurely pace, she started out polite, thinking only the initial dinner was lengthened for her sake, but she quickly became furiously impatient as she came to understand that’s simply how we did things. And over time, her feelings began to pass to me, as all things do in a marriage.

Now, when Heather and I dine out, which we do roughly once a week, an hour is about the longest it ever takes, barring kitchen fires and supply shortages. An hour, even incorporating both appetizer and dessert! Despite my stoicism, it was clear to me very quickly that this was far preferable to the old marathons, and adopted her system with no delay.

However, I find it bleeding over into my normal life more than I’d like, in other situations. Patience has always been something I prized – now I find myself itching to get out of meetings, or parties, or to get on the road home when vacation is ending. 

I’m going to wrap this up.

Oh, Jesus.

This pale, trollish weirdo sums up how we all look as we scream furiously at strangers in dark basements.

Immediate and relentless exposure to the most infantile sort of insults and screaming at the other team (who could not hear them, of course) convinced me very quickly away. Have you heard Mel Gibson’s latest insane ranting? This was pouring forth into my ear as I tried to enjoy myself, but enjoyment was gone. I packed that earpiece away and went back to my single player games.

Perhaps despite all of my posturing otherwise I crave the approval of that subset with which I identify. I find I don’t care much what anyone thinks of me in regular life – maybe this is the outlet for my ego that my self requires, to play with peers and be judged fit. Maybe I respond to the pack-rattish collecting that takes place in these games, running through the same dungeon many times to find that one special item.

I’m not sure what it is. But at least it’s not just me.

I was fairly certain at one point that I would do just that. I had no illusions about the reality of game design, of course, but even the opportunity to be associated so closely with something I’m so in love with had a negating factor on all the negatives, and there were plenty – would have to move to find a studio, would have to claw my way out from thousands of applicants as eager as I was, fairly terrible pay, etc. But it was easy to forget those things, a lot of the time – those few opportunities I had to actually code, as rudimentary as those codings were, made me forget. It was the one “productive” activity I had ever undertaken that affected me in the same way games did – I would be creating something in class and realize that class had ended an hour ago, all the time. And, like as not, I would realize this and bend my head right back to it.

I loved it, as much as I loved gaming itself. But what defeated me was something I hated, something I learned was as married to computer science as death and taxes (at least according to my college system) – math. As a child, I loved math in a similar way, had no issues with the grounded mathematics that measure reality. It was my first experience with Algebra that taught me to hate math with desperation. When I found that computer science carried with it a hefty load of math classes, I did what I was used to doing, what I’d so often done before and so often done since – took the easier choice.

Instead, I completed a Mass Communications degree without ever having any clear idea what to do with it, or any desire to make real use of it, and when I stumbled into my first professional job, I clung to it, and remolded my dreams around it. I assumed in the absence of a tangible goal, unbridled ambition will do the job for you. And it does, for awhile.

But ever since that casual conversation with my wife, it reoccurs to me. I made a casual choice to avoid hard work when it touched on the reality of my future life from that point on. This was not a lunch where I decided on a Philly over a Reuben. I chose to prune off from my possibilities an entire discipline that I loved, because to be certified in it was more difficult than to avoid it.

Ugh. How disgusting that is. And that’s just one of the choices I remember where I looked for the easy path. It probably wasn’t even the most influential. With a few notable exceptions I have unhesitatingly trod the path of least resistance. Now I shy away from anything that results in work of any kind instinctively.

So how does a standing stone choose to roll?

Whew, that’s a relief. It’s not that I love my job – I go back and forth on how I feel about it,

This is vaguely sinister.

as some tasks are awful and unpleasant and some are a lot of fun, as I imagine most people feel. But I have an immense amount of pride in the corporation I work for, which is probably just a symptom of my personality.

Heather and I have gone back and forth on it – there’s few things she loves better than psychoanalyzing me, apparently – and she thinks it’s totally naive to place such trust in an employer, but then, she’s traditionally worked in careers where pinballing around between positions is totally natural. She’s come to have an innate fear of having to leave, or being raided by the FBI, or whatever, whereas I have been snuggling up to the deceptively warm bosom of corporate America for 5 years now.

I received an award last night, partially deserved, for the work I did on a project in 2009, and it was part of a big ceremony including dinner at the Radisson, rah-rah speeches from senior management and a lot of hand-shaking. And as much as I’ve cynically sneered at polls that said employees value recognition more than money, when I was given my little 6″ x 6″ glass circle with my name embossed on it, I felt totally validated in my role.

Maybe it’s symptomatic of my personality, like I said, but I’d like to believe some people feel this way about their employer, lame as those feelings are.

But, oddly, I’m also a manager, which means that I have to be, at least peripherally, a people person. It’s an integral part of my job to schmooze and gladhand and learn facts and details about strangers’ lives that I would cringe from in normal day-to-day. It’s not that I’m anti-social, I just don’t really welcome that kind of conversation about my personal life, so I don’t force it on others. Except I do, now.

One of the things I’ve seen when working with persistant groups o f people is the constancy of rumor and intrigue. Even in my current position, which, to be fair, avoids the heights of scheming more prevalent in retail or the like, there are cliques and whispered conversations and a genuine interest in spreading gossip.

These things tend to be uniformly negative – call in people to discuss a new project and they’ll assume they’re being fired. In fact, rumors seem to really only take off when their import causes panic and dismay.

Do we create these environments to stimulate ourselves? Is, perhaps, the entire success of a business model in a corporate environment based on the self-motivation of fear? It seems utterly foreign to me to fabricate terror and uncertainty where none exists – to shape half-heard rumbling into ironclad fact.

Especially when there’s work to do. Why can’t people just do the job?

I will re-read books over and over – I’ve mentioned this previously. I’ll re-live movies, order the same dishes, visit the same places incessantly in an effort to recapture the past. The most absurd thing about this is that only through exposing myself to new experiences do I find new things that I want to repeat, and yet, I’ll rarely seek out anything new at the cost of revisiting old ground. Another example – having experienced a mostly surprise! vacation a few months ago to Mexico, I’m looking for times when we can go again. To the same place, and stay in the same rental house, though that area has many available.

When something is especially good – some new game, or vacation or restaurant perhaps – my attention leaps to the present to savor it. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to recapture – that sublime feeling of full concentration as my entire mind is paying attention. I tend to remember things so fondly in this manner that it seems to make sense – at the first sense of new enjoyment, my brain engages all my senses at high concentration – what was good is great, and so I struggle to find that feeling again.

Did I just describe getting high on life? I am the lamest person I know.

More like Impossible is Nothing, amirite? *facepalm*

I imagine that all of us sometimes look around at our life and marvel at how things have seemingly grown around us – so locked into our day-to-day routine, we don’t realize we’re also accruing; whether it’s knowledge, a spouse, a home, friends, career advancement, our rut is causing us to accumulate without us knowing. I have responsibilities and a wife, a home, a team of people who report to me. My opinion is taken seriously. When did that happen?

Just as my wife would often marvel, “It’s so weird we’re married!” for months after our wedding, I sometimes wonder if everyone realizes I’m just acting grown up. At work, I answer questions and concerns with what seems to be either common sense or the most expeditious explanation, and it’s almost always right. So am I subconsciously answering correctly or just lucky in my responses?

Are you pretending too? Have you grown up without realizing you did it? We must all be doing so – after all, where would mid-life crises come from if we were constantly aware of our aging? Clearly, there’s a niche of time where we surface and look around and say, and I paraphrase, “You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?”