Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m not spend­ing nearly as much time in the blo­gos­phere lately.  Clearly, bore­dom at old jobs was the pri­mary moti­va­tor there.  I still like read­ing all your blogs and LJs, but with a job that takes 8–12 hours of my day, with­out breaks in vol­ume, my energy for spend­ing time read­ing web­sites is low. My energy in gen­eral is low.

My activ­i­ties out­side of my day job have been win­nowed down to a few things.  I watch TV.  I will never ever crit­i­cize any­one for watch­ing TV over other forms of enter­tain­ment.  When you are men­tally drained, it’s sooth­ing, and helps you unwind.  The qual­ity isn’t that bad these days.  And it’s eas­ier for my wife and I to have a shared expe­ri­ence via a TV show or a movie than it is via a book.  Part of the rea­son I think fic­tion fan­dom is so frac­tured com­pared to the old days is that there are too many choices and we hardly never read the same things.  So lit­tle over­lap in inter­ests anymore.

I’ve found my inter­est in SFF short fic­tion wan­ing quite a bit since tak­ing on the new job.  Roundbottom oddly enough is the only project that inter­ests me.  I haven’t missed actu­ally writ­ing as much as I thought I might.  I guess that’s because I’m writ­ing as much as I ever did, just in one big con­sol­i­dated storyline/​lump.  One post a week is about all I’m good for, see above rea­sons.  I’m not even read­ing since get­ting back from our trip.  Shame, because I was finally start­ing to get into Sam Henderson’s novel.  Maybe I can this week­end.  I need to force myself to take computer/​TV breaks just for the sake of my eyes.

I also think I under­stand now why peo­ple take up drugs like meth.  The idea of get­ting my energy back after a gru­el­ing day fix­ing bugs is tempt­ing.  Meth itself isn’t.  Hell, I don’t even drink caf­feine and have not for over a year now (it messed with my anx­i­ety dis­or­der).  But if I could find a safe, non-​​panic attack induc­ing  method of restor­ing some men­tal energy after a long day, I would do it.  I’m still aim­ing to try Yoga.  I just haven’t had time to enroll in the gym.  I think we’re plan­ning to do that this com­ing weekend.

I feel behind on every­thing and out of touch.  But finan­cially, things have never been bet­ter.  So I can’t com­plain too much.  It’s funny, because I was afraid other peo­ple would stop talk­ing to me because I was tak­ing a break from writ­ing. The real­ity has been the other way around.

The other thing I’ve had energy for is play­ing com­puter games.  For a while, it was Spore, until I got tired of being invaded by unstop­ple alien forces.  I really enjoyed mak­ing things in the cre­ator though.  Now I’m into some Warhammer Online.  I think it’s an iter­a­tive improve­ment on the World of Warcraft model of MMORPGs.  I don’t get too bored run­ning around like I did in WoW.  I like the art and the twisted sense of humor.  I’m play­ing some­thing called a squig herder, a gob­lin class.  I make this lit­tle mon­ster run around and attack things.  It’s the hunter class, basi­cally.    But can the hunter class even­tu­ally jump inside its pet and ride around in its mouth? I guess that ‘s entirely pos­si­ble. I  haven’t played WoW in 3 years. But I doubt it.  I spend a ridicu­lous amount of time in game grow­ing seeds into alchem­i­cal ingre­di­ents. It’s get­ting to the point where I can’t pick up proper loot because I am car­ry­ing so much of that crap around.

We’re still debat­ing about where we want to go next year.  Kansas or Oregon?  Family?  or Friends?  A house? Or apart­ments and rentals.  I think the whole debate is tabled until closer to the date when we know bet­ter what our finances will be and what the state of the var­i­ous economies are.  I’m mak­ing bet­ter money, but Sarah still mostly needs to have a job.

In the mean­while, I’m going to use my time as best I can.  That weird sense of urgency I’ve had for the last sev­eral years has really faded.  Maybe I’ve given up writ­ing for the short story mar­kets for good. Maybe my future really is just in web archi­tec­ture.   I can live with that I guess, so long as the rest of my life is inter­est­ing.  Good friends and con­ver­sa­tion.  Fun is fun, what­ever the form.  Writing stopped being much fun, so it was a good deci­sion to make.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a squig that needs herded.