I’ve been pretty sick for a week. It sucks, too. I don’t get sick with any sort of regularity and usually only once or twice a year. I ended up going to the doctor and was promptly prescribed antibiotics and a hella sweet (literally and figuratively) cough medicine with Codeine added. I am still recovering a bit, but the worst is definitely behind me. I didn’t miss any days of school either. I could barely talk for 2 of those days, but I was still there and cognizant.
So, after talking to one of my friends recently I made a decision. I deleted every single character on my account in WoW. I haven’t looked back, either. It’s not that the game is bad (it kinda is, though) or that some other player made me mad, or even that I thought that I was addicted to it or something. It’s just that relatively recently I can’t shake the feeling that video games are worthless. It costs money and time to play them and the latter isn’t replaceable at all. It’s also increasingly making me feel guilty to waste time like that when I have absolutely no handle on my life at all.
As time moves on, more and more I feel like what I am doing right now isn’t right. I suspect I will be in the same position at the end of the program that was in before it. I don’t want a life if it’s going to be constantly like this. It’s a silly waste of resources. I’ve consumed quite a bit, more than my fair share even. I don’t have anything to contribute back to friends and family who have supported me that isn’t easily found on Google (FYI – that’s how I do tech-support, everyone).
I’ve spent more than 8 years since graduating from high-school building up a healthy amount of debt and searching for some meaning for my existence. The pressure I feel when someone tells me I’m smart or whatever is beginning to wear on me significantly. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate positive comments like that and am thankful when they do come. It’s just that if I’m so smart, how come I can’t seem to pull myself together? Why does it seem like there isn’t a reason for my existence? My sister has a child and my brother just bought a house. What the hell am I doing with myself? I’m going through the motions I am obligated to at the moment, but it all feels really empty and useless.
Last week, my dad encouraged me to throw something in the grocery cart while shopping with the family and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt completely, 100%, unabashedly selfish for even allowing myself to want it for a second. It seemed wasteful. It wasn’t the item itself, it was the realization that I didn’t need it. I don’t deserve even 10% of the support I receive and I am increasingly aware of that. I was referred to as the “bum son” of my dad in what was most likely a light joke earlier this evening, but it stuck with me. I found myself playing it over again in my head in case there was some meaning to be gleaned from it. I feel guilty and ashamed about who I am so I assume that there are plenty of others who feel the same about me. I have a hard time making myself let go of things I hear because I fear the meaning hidden behind.
tl;dr – I’m sick and quit WoW for good. Also, I am a worthless asshole who deserves to die young. (Grandma’s Boy? Anyone?)
So here I am.
It’s 3:45am and I just caught myself pulling down my calculus textbook from almost 2 years ago. I only just recently realized how much it bothers me that I let calculus beat.. well, myself. I have very slowly been looking for ways that I can move forward in math on my own in the past few weeks. I have located a few that I am going to have a go at and see what happens. Maybe in conjunction with my textbook I can self-educate with these resources at my own pace. Math isn’t normally something you hear was learned by someone in their spare time at home from YouTube videos. My trigonometry is very weak so that will be my starting point, concurrently with pre-calculus.
I feel guilty when I think about how much time I throw away on video games. Don’t get me wrong; I love them so! But my Team Fortress 2 stats say it all. I’ve thrown away nearly 750 hours on that one game alone since it was released almost 3 years ago. I think it is safe to say that I have squandered an inordinate amount of time playing WoW, too. If I spend even just half the amount of time I play games working on math problems instead, I would probably be in differential equations by now. That’s the part that bothers me the most, presently. I used all that time that I can’t replace on something that has absolutely no tangible return in any sense. I’m not saying that hobbies need to produce something, if I were into woodworking and building cabinets for instance. (I’m not.) I just mean that those games don’t have a benefit that I can quantify. I can spend 6-7 hours a day playing games, easily. At the end of the day, those hours are wasted. Even with WoW, where character advancement is pretty much what the game is designed around, there isn’t anything I can take away from the experience that matters. I’ve slowly been finding out that I don’t care that my character isn’t level 80 (the maximum). I don’t care that he doesn’t have very good gear. I don’t care about raiding, instances, PvP, or “collecting” achievements. Those are boring. I care about being successful on the auction house. I only want my character to be level 80 because it will make it easier for me to farm materials.
I’m rambling, I know.
I want to figure out if that economic interest translates to the real world somehow. I’m not sure how to go about doing that, but I know that I am going to tackle math again.
It’s been a while.
Living with the folks kinds defeats the purpose of having a blog at all. I assume that no one really reads this thing unless they are looking for intervalometers (my most visited post by far) or random Megas XLR information, so no harm done really.
I am starting class at what is basically a vocational school a mile or two from my house at the start of May. I should be done in 7 months. I hope to be state certified in programming PLC’s and the like at the end. I have a degree already, yes. It is extremely general in nature and next to worthless on the job market. This should give me a focus and hopefully create a nice segue into a career. *fingers crossed*
I can’t get enough information about Europe these days. With any luck at all (not advisable considering my past), I would like to go late Summer 2011. We’ll see. I am mostly reading about traveling through Europe backpacker style. At this point I am gathering as much information as I can to nail down my list of desired destinations.
Kaput.
