Now With More Buds

I haven't blogged in a week, almost exactly.  That's not conspicuous at all, is it?  Don't worry, I might start blogging more frequently again soon.  I start orientation next week.  The pressing concern for the moment is this:

I'm standing in a wedding on Sunday.  I'm excited, but it's in Ohio, and my wife has to work, so that means I'll be apart from my wife for the better part of three days, and as jazzed as I am I'm going to be exhausted, because I know like... three people who are gonna be in the wedding?  I don't know how many Houghtonites will be at the wedding, and that's really the only group of people I know of the bride's, and I know even fewer of the grooms.

Still I'm honored to stand and witness the marriage of two good friends whose distance from me is yet another prod making me yearn to invent teleporters.

Graduating from college seems to have been a subtle shift in anxieties.  Some would say the stakes are higher now than they were, though monetarily I would say no way in heck are they actually.  Except that the high stakes from college have rolled over in the form of student loans looming over my head, demanding to be paid.

But I feel less like there's a single pressing project I need to finish to determine the course of my future, and more like every choice I make throughout every day contributes to the life I'm leading.

It's terrifying, but in the same way as a dull ache is agonizing.

Subtle, and always there, applying pressure.

I'm slowly making my way through The Hunger Games, to the pleasure of my family members who think it is quite good.  I have personal taste qualms about the first person present storytelling, though I think Collins executes it fairly well.  I am most impressed by the wells that go unmentioned in the story, one of things so often overlooked in first person stories.  The narrator is not always a stand-in for the author, and his/her flaws are rarely explicit, since it's hard to be fully conscious of your own failings.  The first person narrator in an active story is never (if the story is well done and the character well-fleshed-out) the unequivocal voice of truth.

Honestly, my personal voice choices have edged towards the third person omniscient, with the narrator having verisimilitude with the author.  It's an old-fashioned preference, but there it is.

At the same time as I wade into the strange coincidental cousin of the film Battle Royale, my wife is finishing up with The Wise Man's Fear, which means I can nerd out with her over a lot of stuff and we equally anticipate the third installment of the Kingkiller Chronicle.  I had some small ambition to review The Name of the Wind myself after reading a particularly aggravating review written by a professional.  I have since procrastinated and haven't done much that could be considered creative in the last week or so.

But I have played Guild Wars 2 like its servers are shutting down.  That's what you do when an MMO releases, right?  Play it eight hours a day for the first week?  That's pretty much what I did.

Now I sit and scoff at my own buffoonery and resist the urge to play the game.  It's hard, okay?  I love that game.  It's a mild obsession, and I'm doing my best to be an adult about it.

It's not going anywhere.

Time marches forward and more cool stuff is on the horizon.  Homestuck continues to be fantastic, a new season of Doctor Who approacheth, The Hobbit comes out this winter, and people have finally stopped harping on the "end of the world" that's supposed to happen before the year's over.  I probably jinxed it by saying that out loud on a blog that gets broadcast to... ten people?  I don't even know who all reads this blog, though you're awesome if you do, whether you agree with most of it or not.

One thing I've noticed about my life now is I don't feel like I'm in an environment where I can say, "All right, now I have to work on this" and have that be accepted.  That's probably just my bogus feelings, but it's true.  I feel like, since I don't have a grade waiting for the work that I do where the value of that grade is a condition of my earning honors that can get me hired better, any work I do is just frivolous head-in-the-clouds creative stuff.  I'm not saying my family doesn't support my art, but...

I need an art space.  A place to sit down that is the place where the ideas and the words are blended in an alchemical concoction meant to be administered to as many individuals as possible.  Okay, that got away from me.

-shrugs-

That's it for now.  Bye guys.