Saturday, August 22, 2009

life goes on

Another saturday is upon me. I had a broken but ultimately sufficient sleep. Hopefully, I'm not in line for another hard fight with insomnia. That would truly suck. Yesterday, my parents and I joined our neighbours for a corn roast. It certainly made for some interesting conversation. The corn was scrumptious and so was the catfish I got to try for the first time.

Psychologically, I'm feeling more able to cope with the life I've got rather than wishing like hell for drastic change. I guess all the isolation finally thumped me against rock bottom. Society sees fit to utterly squander my gifts. Under such circumstances, I'm doing all that I possibly can to enjoy the copious time at my disposal while doing what good I can. I no longer feel that I owe the world more effort than I'm giving. The certainty that things will ultimately improve either by my lucking out in the love department or at least by eventually obtaining affordable housing has taken better root in me. Over the past couple of days, I've actually made quite a bit of progress with Enchantment's Twilight's design document. There's still a ton to do. Even the design document is going to be quite a substantial size when it's finally done. However, I'm hopefully going to avoid the problem of wanting to continuously add new aspects to the game when actual development starts. It'll be especially useful for maintaining a cohesive vision if I ultimately choose to try and turn this into a collaborative Internet community project to be published for free. I'm nowhere near that major fork in the road.

This afternoon, I used Skype to call my grandmother. She sent some money to all her grandchildren and I always like to thank her for it. It makes quite a difference for me. Skype worked quite well as did the new gaming headset. She had no trouble hearing me but couldn't hear other people who were farther away from the mic. Also, she didn't seem to be disturbed by hearing her own voice come back at her despite the pc speakers being on. Dad tried it out also and they had quite a good conversation. It seems we'll be going on a family trip out to Winnipeg at some point. That ought to be a damned nice change of place for me. I've had all too few of those this Summer and it unfortunately shows in my overall lack of progress with Enchantment's Twilight.

Last thursday, I went out with Adam and his latest girlfriend for a meal at Symposium. It was damned good to be there with a couple of people my own age. We thankfully didn't get caught in that major storm walking over there. It struck during our dinner and seemed to be finnished by the time we left. As usual, the conversation was good right along with the food. Keith, one of the waiters there, happened to be serving us and remembered me. All the staff are quite friendly. It's a major reason why I'm fighting as hard as I am to learn how to get there and back independently. Even if, as seems likely, I don't meet anybody new there, I'll still come out ahead. That makes a very nice change of pace when most of the time, my acomplishment and experience don't seem to ultimately count for much more than praze from people I'll never meet. It's the sort of thing that gives me hope for better things to come if I can just hang on, be patient, and try to keep cheerful.

Plentyoffish is a busy place today. I couldn't get in this morning to check on the forums. It seems I somewhat overwelmed the teacher who seems interested in me with too much information. Online dating is so awkward that way. You get no feedback until you've gone and written too much and then, it's done. Revealing too little seems to have made it all to easy for people to keep hold of negative presumptions about me and simply move on. Revealing too much is problematic also. However, at least I'm left with a sense that they've got something to work with if they're actually interested. I've always felt better about things which start with all my cards on the table. I don't want anybody ever to feel that I'm hiding information or less than honest. If they're going to turn away from me, better they do so without any excuse of that nature. There was a time when I had more of a sense of undamaged hope about newly started connections to people. Janene has clearly destroyed a good chunk of that. I fervently hope that some day, I'll meet someone new who can put me on cloud nine again. I'd like to think that I still have enough remaining optimism and faith in people for that to happen. We all need some spark of magic in our lives.

Next up for me, I guess there's church in the morning. Other than that, there's nothing on the radar until wednesday morning when my next lesson comes around. One week has been much the same as the last for too damned long. I'm a bit behind in my podcast listening. By romorrow, there'll be a bunch more for me to grab. Nice to have a small stockpile to give time a good swift kick in the ass when it starts to crawl. I ordered a couple of new accessories for my netbook yesterday. One is a key-operated Kenzington security lock I found a recommendation for in Smart Computing. Subscribing to that website was a splendid investment on my part. I also found out about a new notebook stand which may work better for the netbook and be more portable than the table I've been using. I'll know one way or another about that in around a month I guess.

1 comment:

Heather said...

Hey, care to enter the 3-Day Novel contest this year? I'm registered and looking forward to it.

The premise is that you try to write a novel in...well, you guessed it...three days. You're allowed to outline before the contest starts, but that's it. You start midnight on the Saturday of Labour Day weekend, and you finish at 11:59 on the Monday. Then you've got a week to mail your manuscript in...but no editing or revisions allowed.

You end up with a strange (and sometimes slightly hilarious) novel...but first prize is publication.

Even if you don't officially enter (the fee is $50), it can be a lot of fun to try. The website is http://www.3daynovel.com/.

This will be my fourth attempt. What's fun is the sheer madness of trying to start and finish a story in 72 hours. The so-called novels average about a hundred pages, but lots of people have gone on to revise their work later on and turn them into something else.

I think it might appeal to you.