Their Lives Are Terrible

Long time internet, how have you been? Good? Cool, me too, for the most part. Busy, but good. I’ve been working hard and hardly working, in even doses. I’ve got a lot of school work and a lot of gaming going on, so that’s a nice balance I suppose.

What I want to talk about today is something fun in my life. Anxiety. Lately, more and more, I’ve been experiencing a phenomenon that is asymptotally approaching actual panic attacks. I’m not there, I can function. I can back away and do something else. But I still find myself in class shaking, looking around, and just shy of breaking down. I feel like I’m vibrating inside, shivering so fast that I’ll shatter. Sure, I look fine. I can hold myself together. But I don’t know if or when I’m just gonna blow into pieces during one of these. Shit sucks.

So, I could go to therapy. Oh wait, I did that. Apparently I don’t have problems. I could get medication, but that’s just more paperwork and stress. Besides, they’ll want me to go to therapy for it just to see that I’m not faking to sell some pills. So, what have I done? Drank. All last semester, I was exceptionally productive. Efficient. A star student, by all accounts. I was lazy, but who isn’t? My secret was a shot before every paper, every assignment. A drop of liquor for every painstaking word that never would have gotten written sober. Now, I’m trying to get help. We’ll see how that goes. My adviser says that she’ll have a nice long talk with me tomorrow about this little problem. I wonder if she knows a magic trick. Doubt it.

So, I have edits to do on my thesis. Edits on something I managed to write only 45 minutes before my last meeting, because the shakes would come whenever I tried to get too close to a word processor. Tonight? Rum and coke. Productivity via alchemical concoction. I guess I’m getting practical. So strange.

Location: Living in town. My friends are here, so it’s kind of like home in that it is boring as shit, but better than home because I have the company of other wonderful yet bored people.
Research: I’ve made it over halfway through my first book on my reading list. Maybe I need something to read for fun, because it has been hard to keep up with my reading since I have oh so many distractions.
Playing: Minecraft on the Choochit server and Eve Online. Minecraft has been a bit slow lately as I’m out of inspiration for the moment, while Eve has been a struggle to figure out if I even like the game. My trial expires in two days, and I think I will subscribe and join a corp to conduct further research.

Excerpt from “Only The Young Die Young” (2010)  Based on Headfirst For Halos by My Chemical Romance

According to Evolutionary theory the primary goal of society is to continue to exist. Being made of individuals, a society must create and care for more individuals in order to be considered a success. In this sense, one of the worst things a society must face is the fact of suicide, and so many societies defined suicide as a sin, a horrible tragedy, etc. So it is generally considered an unwelcome addition by the artistic community when it chooses instead to disagree with the standing opinion and depict suicide in a positive light, much less as romantic act of devotion or a valiant end. The My Chemical Romance song “Headfirst for Halos” does just this, singing about the love for a girl and the narrator’s suicide. The narrator recounts his love for drugs, a strike against the standard good behavior depicted by society, with the words “now the red ones make me fly, And the blue ones help me fall”. This is followed by his thoughts “I think I’ll blow my brains against the ceiling, And as the fragments of my skull begin to fall” which end in a gruesome parody of the childlike attitude his generation is inevitably connected to with “And as the fragments of my skull begin to fall, Fall on your tongue like pixie dust just think happy thoughts”. This idea and attitude make up the majority of the song, with the lead singer holding a tone of frustration in his voice the entire time, like a deep held grudge against those who don’t understand. Ending with the last remark, “just think happy thoughts” gives an acceptance to the act, an air of legitimacy in the course of action that is the intentional ending of one’s own life. The chorus adds in the final touch, the idea that everything will turn out ok and this act will lead to something better with “And we’ll fly home, We’ll fly home, You and I, We’ll fly home.”

What do I mean when I say “I’m out of it.” Colloquially, I guess it would mean that I’m not fully aware, but that really doesn’t describe where the place I’m in currently. It’s almost like the eccentricity of an otherwise quite regular orbit. I drift, ever so slightly away from the papers and the people and the banality of life, out into a place where I’m only vaguely corporeal. I can see it all laid out in front of me, life and the path I’m taking, the past and how I never wanted to go anywhere. I’m not a ghost anymore, more wrapped up in the details of every tedious day. Yet every so often, I drift out into the margin and feel that clarity.
As if from the third person, I can see myself. A sweet shirt I bought in Alexandria, a gaming computer I built to play an 8-bit game, a bottle of V-8 fusion spiked with cheap vodka. I am self-aware.
A line from the poem I want read at my funeral. “(Leander Skoff made smoke with cigarettes. Like a lover)”. That’s where I am.

This semester has been… something different. Through most of college, I have pulled through, but only barely. Minimum courseload, minimum effort, minimum work. Prior to last semester, I swear I put in 5 hours a week of work, tops. Last semester I put in the time though, and pulled off my first 4.0. This semester, I’ve been trying to keep up with that standard, but with five classes instead of four, with four of them being writing intensive. It’s been hard, but rewarding in a way.
This semester I woke up at seven am on the first day. Since then I’ve continued to wake up absurdly early, and not entirely of my own volition. It looks like my body has decided to catch up, after all the excessive sleeping in the past. I’m waking up, having time, but still working my tail off and experiencing a significant decline in my freedom to game and otherwise waste away the day. The whole involuntary nature of it all is what’s really throwing me though. I didn’t choose to be productive, it just happened. I’m trying to go with it, and just work with the new time I’ve found, but now I’m feeling it.
“It” of course being the stress of growing up. Being an adult. Paying bills and working my job. In the grand scope of things, it’s easy I suppose. I can recognize that. The seams are showing though, I’m breaking up inside again. I’m trying to ignore it, just keeping up with work, but I can feel the stress in my chest and the pressure behind my eyes. I never thought I was made to succeed, just built to fail. Now I don’t know how to play this professional game. Where is the walkthrough for my life?

The first day of every semester, and usually the second, is filled with syllabi and professors who read it aloud. Occasionally a professor here and there tries to package some deep and well-meaning advice in with their course requirements. Something like “Don’t start your paper the night before it’s due” or “Keeping up with reading is imperative and you will fail without doing so.” Rarely is this tactic effective, and even more rarely is it accurate. I’ve pumped out a 17-page “A” paper in one sitting and I’ve passed whole semesters without cracking “required” textbooks. Today though, a professor gave us a mandatory textbook that had nothing to do with the course itself, a vocabulary improvement text. He claimed that “the number of people who can write their own thoughts is diminishing.”
My first thought of course was that this was preposterous, that the existence of the blogosphere itself renders this argument patently false. Then, my mind turned to tumblr. Oh. Right. The existence of tumblr as a mechanism to reduce individual thought, to reproduce and share the same old material in a recursive loop of “rebellion” and “individuality”. It is almost enough to make me ill.
I remember vaguely a comment on how the best way to remove the power from a word is to repeat it. I think it’s from Julius Caesar, actually. Marc Antony’s speech. To remove the power of the rebellion, to render the punk rock mentality harmless, one only needs to make them popular.
I don’t know if that’s where we are, or if individual content can still thrive despite the torrent of memes and pictures of goddamn adorable cats that choke the internet like an oxygen stealing algae. This sounds depressing, and doomsday preaching, and I suppose it is to a degree. Because I possess a fear, a fear that we are all becoming the same. Think the same, speak the same, and repeat after me. I am unique.

I’ve been thinking about continuity lately.  Not that thing where you catch somebody in a movie switch their t-shirt in the middle of a scene, but the kind of continuity that gets used in those pseudo-philosophy fortune cookies.  The kind that shows up in self-help books, and pamphlets about new year’s resolutions.  The idea that every day when you wake up, you are someone different from who you were yesterday.  A lot of the time those books will tell you this means there is no good reason not to turn over a new leaf and be somebody better than yesterday.  Of course, it’s really more like that parable about Alexander the Great’s boat, where his favorite boat is patched and fixed so many times that it no longer has a single piece of the original boat, but it is incredibly difficult to label the exact point where it stopped being the old boat, and started being a new one.  In any case, I’m rambling.

Back to continuity.  I’m thinking about this, because I’m thinking about when I changed.  I’m not a baby, I’m not a toddler, I’m not a kid, and I’m not a teen.  I don’t like all of the same music I used to, I don’t believe much that I used to, and I don’t have anything resembling the same goals as I used too.  I wanted to be a paleontologist, or a poet, or a great lover.  Now, I’m just planning on going to grad school to make the world a better place in my own little way.  I don’t know where I stopped being the person who hated himself and wrote some seriously awful poetry on the internet.  I also don’t know when I can stop regretting things I’ve done in the past because they are things that were done by someone who straight up just isn’t me anymore.  There’s not a clear line, and as long as I keep mucking about in old e-mails and keeping boxes of letters that still smell like exes, I’m never going to be able to see when  I’ve crossed it.

So to wrap this up.  I bought this domain over a year ago, and I’ve yet to use it for good.  But it was too good to give up, because I had the perfect name.  The perfect header to put above everything I think or say.  Their lives are terrible.  It comes from this strip, in case you didn’t know.  It’s interesting that the title has held up through so many changes.  This website has always been the same site, even when it held bad rhymes and crappy sketches, when I tried to make it about old movie reviews, and when I thought about making it a professional portfolio.  I don’t think I could point to a time when it became better, unless of course this is it.  But I think about that strip, and I think about me, and I’m glad it still works.  See, I used to be the hater.  The green limned envious observer who knew, knew the truth about those who wore a smile.  Now I’d like to fancy I’ve grown a bit, although I can recognize I know shit all about life, and even though I’ve found my smile and can be productive, there is still the old me.  I know who I used to be, I don’t know where I’m going.  But I know their lives are terrible.

What is burnout?  In 140 characters?  That’s simply not enough to say it like it is.

Burnout is the point where logging in is exhausting, where the game cannot hold your interests, where you idle in Stormwind (or Org) for an hour then log off without doing anything.  It’s the point when the only gear left to drop for you is on bosses you’ll never see.  Burnout is, poetically, what happens when there is nothing left to fuel your play and the excitement is gone.

For me, burnout occurred twice.  Once, when real life took me away from the game.  When changes outside of Azeroth promised me a greater reward for my time.  Finals during school, a role in a play, and a new relationship took me away from the same old VP grind in exchange for the promise of a future job, the spotlight, and some good old fashioned romance.  But when the fresh paint dried, I found myself missing that good old-fashioned raiding camaraderie.  So, legitimate burnout or not?  That’s not for me to say.

The second experience I’ve had with burnout came after my return to the game.  I rejoined my old guild on a kind of probationary trial period, and I worked hard and fast to get back up to speed.  When I was rejected for my old raiding position though, I was forced to find a new place to play.  This, in my opinion, is the more common burnout.  Going through wow-progress, creating a character o each realm to contact officers, trying to get a straight answer on recruitment needs and guild atmosphere, only to finally transfer and join an utterly toxic environment.  I couldn’t play there, where the jokes were sophomoric and offensive, the people selfish and rude; no amount of epics were worth logging in.  But going through the guild listings again?  Transferring again?  Almost unbearable.

I had lost all desire to play, my character had transferred and changed so many times that they weren’t me any more.  I had no history, no home realm, and no goal that could make it worth the hell of logging into a raging guild leader every night for “temporary ten-man raids due to attendance difficulties.”  Being a twenty-five man raider is hard, and being a homeless one is harder.  That’s the story of how I burnt out.

Epilogue: I still play WoW, and I still raid 25′s.  But now I raid 6-hours a week with little hope of ever seeing H Ragnaros.  My guild is casual and extremely large, and I know nobody there.  I raid more out of habit than out of desire, but without the game my evenings are empty so I persist in the hope that Blizz will fix this game one day.  I keep my UI intact, my logs fresh, and my gear up to date so that one day I can raid with the people I like, and go back home.