2023-02-05 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: February 5, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2023

Howdy folks. My mind is pretty distracted. Yesterday, I played Hades for about 12 hours. Was it fun? Yes. Was it productive? Not at all. Will I remember that day for the rest of my life? Almost certainly not. But I did beat Hades and see my mother. So really it was a bit of a wash.

Video games are one of those things that I have a perpetual love-hate relationship with. They’re fun, but I can feel that they’re an addicting thing. I can sit back and play them for whole days, blink and hours go by. It’s weird how for some activities that can be a good thing. If I read a book and looked up and it had been 12 hours and I had read a thousand pages or whatever, I would feel accomplished. With video games, I kinda feel like I wasted my time. That said, I have been burning the candle at both ends recently: adjusting my schedule, reading a lot, writing a lot (well, planning?), and just generally being active from when I wake up to when I crash in the evenings. It’s good to have taken a day to just do none of that, but I should also do my best to maintain the Seinfeld rule and only miss one day.

I’m off to Chicago next week, and I still haven’t booked a hotel for the last few days. I also didn’t reach out to Nhyta, which is kinda the reason I had originally planned to go to Chicago those days in the first place. I don’t actually even know if I should reach out to her. Is that bad? Am I afraid? There is a tinge of nervousness inside of me, where I feel like I should just let a sleeping bear lie. I don’t really want to reopen old wounds or anything like that. I suppose I’m also a little wary of myself — it’s not like I think about her very often, it’s usually just this sort of passing curiosity that comes up every now and again. I suppose more than anything, I feel weird having spent a large chunk of my life with her and now we just don’t speak at all. I feel like that’s not the way it should be, but I also feel like I’m clinging to something because it’s not that way. There’s a world in which I hold her more lightly for whatever her life is like at the moment, and I don’t really know how to do that right now.

Otherwise, work stuff will be fine. I feel a bit drained with work, and the more I reflect back on what I want out of work, I kind of just don’t want anything specifically? I want to do my work and leave. That’s about it, and I don’t really know how to tell my manager that (I think the answer is that you don’t tell them), but I also dislike the question “what do you want to DRI” because the answer is “nothing.” Something something rat race.

So what’s this story about huh? The more I’m reading Rothfuss’ work, the more it’s clarifying to me just how he writes such fascinating stories. The way each little thread weaves together to make this fascinating quilt. This finally came through for me when Kvothe collaborates with everyone to get back the clay figure that Ambrose uses to attack him — all of those people needed to be pulled together, and all of these story rounds start to tie themselves together.

But as for this As Yet Unnamed Story (AYUS), I feel like the MC is probably quite a bit like Kvothe: confident but a bit foolhardy, certain that all things have their explanations.