And that worries me.

I got so wrapped in trying to make this epic mod for Skyrim FUCKING WORK that I almost forgot that I had not blogged today and still needed to do so.

And that would be crossing a line I dare not cross. Not now.

See, now that I will not be writing episodes of Uno for a while, the blog is all I have that is holding me together. That’s been its role for a long long time. No matter how bad it got, I had something productive (and therapeutic) to do with my time every day.

if I let that slip while pursuing my exciting (and frustrating, and challenging) new hobby, I will lose all sense of structure and my center will not hold.

And then I will go crazy,. I know this because that’s what almost happened recently. By any definition, entering a state in which you stop eating and sleeping because you are so rapt in pursuing a hobby is a form of insanity.

After all,. it meets two of the classic criterion :

a. It took over my life and made me lose interest in the world, and
b. It made me a risk to myself or others. Mostly myself, although I suppose that if, wjhen I was at my lowest point, someone had tried to get between me and my computer, I might have tried to brain them with my bottle of Febreze.

So until I settle on another daily activity which can absorb my excess creative energies, I must hew to this work of mine like a guilty Protestant.

What bug me is the irony of my situation. I had gotten my balance back. I did my blogging and my episodes and the rest of the time I messed about with Skyrim and it’s wonderful world of unfettered perversion.

And my lord, is there a lot of it.

Anyhow, so I was fighting back to a point of stability and even getting really into writing my episodes. I had talked myself through the inertial resistance to doing things other than Skyrim jiggery pokery and realized that I was really enjoying the writing. I was really starting to feel my power as a writer and I was stretching my wings and bringing things to a whole new level.

So why resist that?

But then, and this is where the irony sinks its teeth into my flesh, but then an objectively very nice thing happens and the whole thing comes a-tumbling down again.

That objectively nice thing is, of course, the my boss Prasad put me on paid vacation. Most people would absolutely love that. And I tried to have the normal reaction to that. And I managed to do so…. for around a day.

But the truth is, I would rather be working. I’m better off working. I am saner when I am working,. I have grown used to having a genuinely productive thing that I get paid to do in my life. I am going to miss it for the next two weeks or so.

It reminds me strongly of how too many days off in a row made me depressed when I was going to VFS.

Two days was fine. Three made me enter the bottom of the yellow alert zone. Any more than that and my odds of ending up depressed went up logarithmically. .

And it was because I didn’t know what to do with myself. The hours stretched ahead of me like a death sentence except without the happy ending. With depression blocking my energies, they built up inside, and with nowhere to go, they venting inward.

And that’s a bad thing. It rips me up inside.

My problem now is different in that I definitely have something that can absorb all the energy I want to put into it. My new hobby. The endless pursuit of Skyrim boinking. So my energies are not being blocked. They are, in fact, being expressed at an unprecedented rate and on a deeper level than ever before.

However, the form of their expression is not good for my sanity. In a strange way, it’s a relief that addiction has finally found me.

I have dodged it so long by conveniently and cleverly not having a life.

But nothing could have prepared me for this arena of endeavour that could suck up enormous amounts of drive and energy and be challenging to my cleverness and resourcefulness and creative problem solving skills.

And it has the most addictive thing in the world for someone like me : moreso than any video game, it rewards effort.

When effort yields rewards in some form of direct proportion – even if the conversation rate is pretty lousy – you get way, way more effort.

That’s why entrepreneurs work so hard. And why wage slaves don’t. The ideal model is a modest fix salary and a robust reward system based, at least in part, on the value the employee actually generates.

What a novel idea.

Now where was I. It’s hard to stay on subject when you mind naturally flollows the connections between things instead of the things themselves.

Everything branches out!

Oh right. Reward for effort. I have not known a lot of that in my life. Not in so direct and reliable a form. Often this has been because the things that are expected of me do not take very much effort on my part,.

And I have only recently grown to the point where I even realize that I can look for more rewarding things, let alone do them.

I have a strange combination of extraordinary mental powers and cowardice. Like I explore with my mind but that’s it. Anything outside my comfort zone – especially anything requiring an increase in stimulation levels do to unfamiliarity – and I freeze up and run away.

I’m like Descartes trying to deduce the entire world from his bed.

And I hate Descartes.

I think he was cogito ergo dum.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.