Halloween Countdown, Day 6

You all thought I'd forgotten about today, didn't you?

Fortunately, today's entry is just fashionably late:

Leafe me allllloooooooone! I vant to be ALONE! I vant to vallow in... vhatever it is that famponies are supposed to vallow in! 

... Do famponies vallow in pity...? 

OH, listen to me, I don't eefen know vhat I'm supposed to vallow in! I'M SO PATHHHHEEEEEEETIIIIIC!

(staples fetlock to forehead)



cf. Toreador

[AFHOTWTTGS] Somwhat Overcast Sunday Teatime of the Soul

I'm flitting a lot, at the moment.

I can't seem to settle on a Project - by which I mean Game to Play, but you know how it is - if it isn't taken seriously and treated like work it feels like a waste of time, and if I'm just running something out of the box I generally feel bored and unfulfilled; I haven't really had to engage my mind and grapple with anything... but isn't that what a hobby is supposed to be? An opportunity to not do that? But don't I have an obligation to engage my mind and grapple with things if I'm not having cause to do that anywhere else in life? But doesn't that in turn mean that I should be doing something important and challenging and improving my life instead of faffing around playing wizard games?

You see what I mean? I'm asking too many questions instead of just doing things and having fun with them. Overanalysing. Fretting. Flitting. Doubting. Not actually doing things. Blogging about why I'm not actually doing things.

Not a good head-space to be in, especially over games - which, while they are part of 'real life' and don't let anyone tell you otherwise - are not ultimately going to put roofs over heads and potatoes in tummies, and are consequently Not Worth The Fuss in the first place.

Last week it was the IKRPG, this week it's D&D, next week it's Mage (although Mage is something actual people have expressed an interest in, so maybe I'll actually see that through - who knows?). All the verb-ing described above means there's not a lot of actual gaming going on in Von-town at the moment, and that's bad - but trying to get a game on the go results in more verb-ing.

It's probably a sign of underlying dissatisfaction with my life, manifesting itself in the harmless, consequence-less space of gaming (except it's not consequence-less, because real time and real money and real effort are invested in games and real fun is not a guaranteed output... you see?)

This is the sort of thinking that prompted me into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy so I could try to avoid it.

This is the sort of thing that prompts friends and guildmates and colleagues to say "just be spontaneous."

This is the sort of thing that leaves me out of pocket and out of time when I've been spontaneous and been disappointed.

This is the sort of thing that leads to whiny, self-indulgent blog posts like this one.

Maybe I need to browbeat someone else into GMing for me? Seeing other people do a crap job (by which I generally mean "running their game the way they want to and not the way I would") generally makes me want to outdo them.

Either way, talking about doing ain't the same as doing.

I'll be back when I have my head sorted out and my priorities straightened and some actual gaming on the go.

No Monday Gunday for you!

Sorry to go all Soup Nazi on you, but here's what happened:

I originally planned to do a post on "Felt recoil difference between 124gr +P and 147gr." Then I realized, Hey, maybe I should get more data on this, as this is just my experience with my pistol.  So I logged in to #GunbloggerConspiracy to ask around.

Well, it turns out that some of their experiences were different than mine. I felt that what I needed to do was shoot the ammo from various pistols to find out for sure.  Someone who is ging to the NRA Annual Meeting offered to let me shoot his various 9mm pistols.  So okay, I put that one to the side in favor of collecting more data.

Then I got the idea of asking, "Hey, what kind of bad gun habits do you have?"  I don't mean irresponsible gun handling or anything, but more like "I do this thing and it's probably poor form but I'm not violating any Col. Cooper's Rules so it's only a mild peccadillo at best."   Like, I'm talking the gunnie versions of "I don't always wash my hands after I use the bathroom" or "I still pick my nose" kind of things. I guess I figured people would read it, and laugh, and say "Oh, hey, I do the same thing, it's not a big deal"  or "I do this thing that's kinda weird and kinda funny, you'll like it" and we'd all have a good time.

So I wrote the post, including my own minor little sin just to start things off, and then after it was ready to go I held off from posting. That little voice in the back of my head was asking Hey, is this really such a good idea?  You know how much people on the internet love to be self-righteous and jump all over folks who do things the "wrong" way.

I was still up in the air about it (because, y'know, I've kind of built this blog around being confessional about the dumb things I say and do -- Useful Idiot, I make mistakes so you don't have to, etc) when I thought of a second, and probably better, reason not to post it:

We gun owners have enough difficulty with our opponents as it is. Why should I give our political enemies more ammunition (heh) to use against us?  The last thing we need is for someone to link to my blog and say "Oh, so you gun owners are so responsible?  Why then does Erin Palette pick her toes in Poughkeepsie with a P-38, then? Huh? Huh?"  And then everyone would get annoyed and sigh deeply and roll their eyes and ask me not to help our opponents so much.

Now it's 2:15 am my time  (not yet midnight on the West Coast, so I'm counting this as a win), and the only thing I have to show for today is this.

And that's why no soup for you.

If You Could Only See

To my sweetheart:

If I could fix your problems, I would. But I can't. Instead, all I can do is think of this song, because it reminds me of you and gives me hope.

I love you.
-- Erin

The End of the Beginning

The End of the Beginning


When I am alone I dream of the world ending
Cities and monuments crumbling into dust
The weight of the world literally at my feet

Sometimes in this dream I am by myself
Alone but not lonely in an alien land
Needing no one in order to survive.

Other times you are with me
Carving out a new life amidst the wreckage of the old
Starting anew in the most literal of ways.

In both cases I am unrepentantly myself
Living without need for explanation or justification for who I am
Simply being me, no more and no less.

As our world collapses around us
I ask of you the hardest simple task you will ever face:
"Live in hope and not in fear."