Here I sit, on the cusp, indeed the very brink, of employment.
The writing for video games is going to give me a crack at their writing test. That involves writing 7 articles based on headlines they will give me for $35.
And I am eager to go. Champing at the bit. I am reluctantly crouched at the starting line.
But alas, there is one more hurdle. In order for me to get that precious first assignment, I need to access a Google Workspace, and to do THAT, I need the guy behind the assignment to grant me permission to do so.
So yeah, it’s “hurry up and wait” time. I am so eager to show my potential new boss what a kick ass writer I am that having to wait is painful.
But wait I shall. Of course.
Haven’t heard back from any of the other jobs I have applied for via UpWork. I am going to give them till Friday before I start applying for more gigs.
After all, I don’t want to end up getting new work when I am in the middle of existing work. I mean, I should be so lucky, but it would be stressful.
And I just don’t like having too many plates spinning at once. I am not a natural multitasker and I reach my limit where if I add a task, I lose a task pretty quick.
Heck, it’s rare that I even have two video games on the go at the same time, like I do now, because of this dislike of splitting my attention.
Yet there is a REALLY good sale happening on Steam right now. A rectum-load of expensive AAA games are on sale for like half off, including two of particular interest to me, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2.
Coincidentally, both are games I bought and then found out they wouldn’t run on my hardware so I had to return them.
But that was before I got my Graphics Card of Ultimate Doom. So I am eager to give them another shot.
I will admit, there is a strange sort of redemption/revenge angle to that.
But if I buy one of the games, what then? Having THREE games on the go?
Madness. Anarchy. Blood in the streets.
I’d better make my mind up soon, though, because the sale ends tomorrow.
I hate having to make decisions under time pressure.
I have the money. In that I still have that $70 I have been trying to spend since last Halloween or so.
I buy games. But then I return them when the two hour return window is about to close.
It’s a good thing Steam is not a person or they would be getting pretty sick of this high strung indecisive bullshit of mine by now.
I guess you could say I have a serious problem with commitment, at least when it comes to committing my money.
If only there was a decent Netflix-like subscription based service where I could play games for as long as I like for one easy monthly fee.
They exist, but they all have a terrible selection and crappy network connectivity.
Um, no thanks.
More after the break.
Flat like the horizon
That’s how my mood graph would look right now. Not happy, not sad, just… meh.
Frequency low. Amplitude hovering around zero. Like a recording of an empty room in with no windows in the middle of the night.
And that’s not a good thing.
Because it means I am numb, and dangerously apathetic. If I did not have iron self control at all times, this would be the sort of thing that led to self-harm, or worse.
Because underneath the superficial calm and dead affect is a brain screaming to feel something, anything, anything at all.
There’s definitely been times in my life when pain made me almost giddy with joy because I was finally feeling something.
Something actually penetrated the numbness and stirred something inside me that reminded me I was alive. A real live human being here on this planet with eight billion other souls living and breathing and feeling and being part of life.
Just because I can’t feel them doesn’t mean they are not there. It just means my maladjusted mind is activating my parasympathetic nervous system waaaaay too hard so instead of merely calming me back down after an adrenaline response, which is what it is supposed to do.
Mine goes too far in that direction. Waaaaay too far.
And despite what you might thing, feeling nothing is far worse than feeling something bad. At least feeling bad makes you feel alive by stimulating an adrenal response strong enough to penetrate that god damned layer of parasympathetic paralysis.
Feeling bad may suck, but at least it doesn’t leave me feeling absolutely and totally alone in the universe. Like it’s just me floating in an endless silent white void of absolute nothingness. Less than nothing, in fact, because not even space/time is present.
It’s a null set. A something with noting inside.
Look, some people self-soothe with liquor. Others do it with a hot bath.
Me, I self-soothe with science.
It really does make me feel better.
Of course, ideally, I’d neither be numb OR in pain but somewhere nice in between. A nice neighborhood where the people are kind and understanding and the real estate is reasonably priced and even a busted up freak like me can cope.
But I’m always denied any sort of happy medium. Maybe my brain just doesn’t know what the merry middle even is any more, and looks on it with grave suspicion as being far too simple to be trusted.
Maybe I just need to learn to express my emotions better. Express them in life, in realtime, instead of only letting them out onto this very page.
It’s hard for me to even imagine what that would be like. I have been locking everything away for so long that the very thought of free-range emotions seems hostile and bizarre to me now.
But then I wouldn’t be able to control what I express. My emotions would just go out into the world unregulated and unguarded, left to fend for themselves.
Then people might actually know how I really feel about things.
They might catch a glimpse of the true, unedited, uncut me and I would be exposed to the whole world.
Surely only annihilation can come after that.
But it’s not like my current self is worth keeping around anyhow.
I could really use a hard reboot and restore from backups.
Anyone know how to give me ECT?
I will talk to your nice people again tomorrow.