Today has been rough so far. That’s because of the bad sleep.

You know what I’m talking about.. The dream-packed sleep where I wake up sweaty and disoriented and feeling like I have been running a marathon underwater. The tortured sleep that leaves me drained instead of refreshed. The sleep that wears me out and leaves me so tired that, despite how bad the previous sleep was, I need to sleep even more.

That’s where I am now. I have slept for around nine hours so far, and yet, I really want to crawl back into bed and sleep even more.

It’s almost like an addiction.

But I have things to do, and so I must resist. At the very least, I have to get my blogging done. That’s non-negotiable. If I have the strength, I want to finish my DDD as well. I have two categories left to do : Weapons and Gadgets, and Locations.

Locations will require some (gasp!) research. I have set my game on the island of Manhattan, which in the game is practically a ghost town with only 67,000 residents. It’s also the seat of power for the Christian Fascist government that are the bad guys of my game. And seeing as I am using a real place as my setting, and I insist upon accuracy in that kind of thing, that means I will have to study a map of Manhattan and get an idea of where my adventure will take my protagonist.

This is why I normally make everything up. You don’t have to research make-believe places and things. They are exactly how you say they are. All you have to worry about is making sure everything is internally consistent.

But my game is about a worst-case nightmare America, and as that happens to be a real place, I have to get it right. And it has to be someplace iconic because my game has very strong political underpinnings and that requires equally strong symbols.

The other possibility is setting it in Washington, DC. There are plenty of iconic monuments there. And it has the sort of privilege versus poverty thing going on that I want for my game. But I dunno… seems a little too on the nose for me.

Plus I really want to explore just how eerie a ghost town version of Manhattan could be. Vast apartment complexes with nobody living in them. Silent streets with no cars and no people, just the sound of the wind. Piles of rubble where there used to be homes. Everything left to rot and decay.

Urban decay is a powerful symbol. It both frightens and soothes us. It frightens our civilized side, which knows how important it is that people remain civilized and just how dependent we are on modern society, and how horrible it would be if it all fell apart.

But it’s soothing to our untamed side because it shows nature triumphing over the artificial constructs of humanity. There is a part of us, buried deep, that rebels against the thousand tiny suppressions of modern life, and when we see the natural world win over it, it makes this side of us very happy.

Finally, this side of us say, things are getting back to normal.

So I would like to get that done. It’s not due till Wednesday, and to be honest, the full thing isn’t due for two weeks after that, but I have the damned thing nearly done and once I am finished with it, I I can move on to other assignments.

For one thing, I have a buttload of work to do for Career Launch class. None of it is due till the very last class, technically, but I want to be able to submit it to Kat ASAP so she can tell me what I have done wrong.

This is important stuff that will represent me in the future, when I am looking for work. I want to get it as close to perfect as I can.

Plus I have a rewrite of my pilot and second episodes to do, and of course notes to generate on my classmates’ stuff.

I am always dissatisfied with my notes. I am always pointing out small language and logic issues when my classmates are talking about the deeper and more important issues. It makes me feel like my notes just plain suck.

I think the problem is that I read their work and make notes at the same time. And that means I only notice the small stuff because I don’t have the big picture yet. If I was more energetic, I would read the whole thing once, then do something else while I am processing it, then read it again while making notes.

Oh well, I can only try harder in the future.

It feels like graduation is coming on like an out of control freight train. This upcoming week will be Week 5 of 8 in the term. Imagine that. I am beginning to worry about the nitty gritty issues of what my life will be like after I graduate. The whole notion of it freaks me out sometimes because it looms so large in my mind. And there are so many possibilities.

I worry that I will sink back into the depressed state I was in before I went to Kwantlen without some external source of structure. I have plenty of ideas on how I will stay busy even after graduation, but ideas alone won’t keep me out of the doldrums.

There were always tons of things I could have been doing in the pre-Kwantlen years. I didn’t do any of them. All I did was play video games and chat online and surf the Web and read. For twenty fucking years, that was my entire life.

The worst illnesses are the ones that keep you from seeking treatment. Depression was that kind of illness for me. I was too timid and passive and unmotivated to demand the kind of therapy I needed for a very long time.

Hell, for a big chunk of that time, I didn’t even know I was sick in a way that could be treated. I just knew there was something terribly wrong with me.

But at least now I have gone quite a long ways down the road to recovery. I am hoping that the sort of life I led before Kwantlen will now leave me bored, frustrated, and dissatisfied with my life.

It will be up to be to act on and thus reinforce those feelings instead of doing what I did before, which was to passively wait for the feelings to go away.

Once I graduate I will be in a state of constant peril.

It will do me good to remember that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.