I’ve been trying to think of something to write - long-form, not accompanied by a picture of my face for the pure sake of justifying meaningless rambling, still somehow able to engage one or two people - and I’ve really been struggling. I used to have a lot of faith in my ability to articulate myself. In person, I might have been quiet, thoughtful, only saying things when absolutely necessary, but online I’ve always been pretty good at coming across as confident and (to those already predisposed to think so) sort-of clever.
And… I don’t know. Maybe it’s the current state of my life, maybe it’s my mindset, but that’s hard lately. There’s this basic awareness that there is stuff going on in my head, but not the confidence to adequately express what that stuff is. And when I am confident enough, I’m worried that further down the line I’ll contradict myself and render a huge block of text meaningless.
I have a job. There’s one place to start. I’m working on a temporary contract in the enrolment offices of a further education college, entering data into a creaking computer system that misbehaves more than you think it would. Getting up in the morning at the same time every day has been a strange learning curve. I’d almost forgotten what real mental exhaustion was like - it’s not something you get from thinking too hard, but from thinking about the same stuff constantly, for hours at a time. It doesn’t matter what it is - nagging paranoia, an exciting creative project or (in my case) inputting student data with a reasonable degree of accuracy - think about something for too long, and you start to glaze over. Things start to turn fuzzy. Your ability to articulate yourself ebbs away. I’ve applied for a job at the same place that involves talking to students in addition to a similar administrative load, and it’s something I’d actually enjoy doing. I’ll have to wait and see if I get it - and if I do, I’ll have to take on a way of thinking that’s alien to how I’ve been living my life for the last few years.
I haven’t been writing, fiction or otherwise. I don’t have the confidence. I need to figure out a few exercises, entirely unrelated to my current projects, and hone my skills, scrape off the rust, add the much-needed polish that’s lost when you neglect something for a couple of years. I’ve been on the cusp of starting to write again so often that it’s a meaningless expression by now, but I’m getting into a mindset that lends itself to the sort of attitude that allows for creative expression. It might just be for another month, but the fact that I have a limited amount of time is making me consider how I actually spend that time.
Having said that, the things I’ve been filling it with have been dubious in terms of their productivity. The thing that’s eating up most of my time at the moment is Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. It’s the sort of game perfectly designed to eat up my life - a difficulty curve that goes easy on the player, beautiful design, and a bias towards collector-types (I still have Arkham City installed long after completing it, because I’m obsessed with finding every single Riddler trophy).
Truth be told, I have a weird relationship with video games when you consider the amount of time I’ve been pouring into them since September. Part of this is a need to catch up - there are countless examples of the genre that had been closed off to me until relatively recently - but I also like the sense of immediate immersion. I can play games and not have to worry about slowly being allowed into a world. There are no careful camera angles or slow narrative sweeps - it’s all there, waiting for you to define the experience.
These are all great things, of course, but it’s meant that I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like, or watching that many films. I have these colossal queues of media that up until the start of my degree I just didn’t have, and even when something’s done there’s no sigh of relief - the next thing’s waiting to come along. The only exception to this is music - I make a point of listening to everything in my library as soon as I get it, and often on repeat (recently: this track). In fact, with music, thanks to a lack of new songs in my library and a wealth of listening history (also: a new Last.fm account), I’ve been listening to artists that have gone ignored for years, and it’s an immensely satisfying experience.
It’s strange to think that maybe, one day, I’ll be doing that with games. There are all these jargon-esque terms when it comes to video game design (I’m learning this stuff as the fiancé of a game designer), and one that doesn’t really get used with the same degree of authority in books and films is “replay value”. Especially in role-playing games, even after pouring eighty-six hours into Skyrim, I’m fully aware that I could pour another ninety hours into a different character, with different choices, and my experience would be entirely different. Films and books don’t really do this. That said, films and books rarely crash to the desktop without even a hint of an explanation either.
I’m starting to appreciate some sense of social stability, too. I won’t say too much about this (two of my closest friends are likely reading this, a couple of others might occasionally check in, and no doubt some of my enemies have found this and are filling up their mouths with bile with every single word they read), but thanks to a few things I’m a little bit more in control of who I see and when. It’s nice to have this - throughout my time in high school and college, I was usually seen as part of a couple (between ‘04 and '06 I was the social subordinate to my partner; from then until recently I was the quieter member of a friendship that I suspect was seen from the outside as an entertainment duo as opposed to individual humans). Having the confidence to get in touch with people without going through someone else has done wonders for my self-esteem. I don’t feel as shut out, and there’s a general sort of fuck-you attitude to any imagined people who might think that I’m being socially inappropriate in blatantly asking after people’s availability.
Maybe this is related (though I suspect that, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t), but I added six more people on Facebook over the last week. Four of them were people I see on a regular basis. One is someone who I’d like to see more, but is spending a lot of time abroad. The other one is just a friend request I had lying there for about a year, and I just felt bad turning it down. I’ve learned a few things from this.
First: when you start building social connections with people on the internet, the increase in interest is exponential. Ignoring the spammy friend suggestions from people who should (and do) know better (which is why they were doing it in the first place), there have been some genuine requests from people to involve themselves in my online life again. Some of these I’ve turned down because I’m at that weird juncture where I might start seeing them more often, or I might never see them again. Some of them I’ve never met. Some of them are people who used to be absurdly close, but whom I haven’t spoken to in years. I’ve deleted them all. I’m not interested in that sort of passive-aggressive online identity where you post photos about your GR8 NITE OUT just to assert the fact that you’re getting out more than other people. I don’t hoard people. I used to - my old blog had (and still has, bizarrely) over two thousand followers because I went out and found them, and my Facebook account had about two hundred friends at its peak, most of whom I’d be lucky to speak to once over the course of a year.
What this means now, then, is that my still-largely-inactive Facebook account is a hybrid of people I don’t know too well (and some whom I do) across the globe, most of whom have come from the internet, and people who I see at least once a week. Barney sits alongside Ren, Remedy is next to Greg, and I’ll be surprised if any of these people ever talk. (The one exception to this is the occasional conversation between Barney and Arden, though Arden is one of the few people I’ve met online who has really made that leap from an “internet friend” to a “real-life friend”, absurd as those categories are. Also, Arden and I didn’t exactly stop there.) I’m not sure how to approach it, but weirder than anything is that I’m comfortable with it. If people I know clash, even if it’s in an online space that I supposedly regulate, I don’t… really… care. I used to be so awkward - now, I still have the same silence that goes with awkward people, but I observe rather than fidget uncomfortably.
… that’s it. It’s abrupt, and it was always going to be because I’ve gone without writing long things for so long that I can’t think of witty-but-trite endings that make some grand point about life, the universe and everything off the back of a post about friends, social networking, employment and culture. That makes sense in itself, though - life, or rather lifestyle at the moment is this thing that I’m renegotiating every week, and all I can do in the meantime is lay it out and look for patterns. In a week, maybe I’ll look back at this inane, meandering mammoth of a post and suddenly see some pattern or insight that I’m missing at the moment. If nothing else, that’s a reason to write it.
Yep. We’re done here.