Shake Ups and Break Ups

Journal of Clarity – 022 – March 27, 2013

Hello! This marks the first entry to the Journal of Clarity that will be publicized on the internet on my blog that only maybe three people will actually read. A few notes to make before moving on. First, as mentioned in the online version, names will be changed to protect the innocent. Names in the private version will remain untouched because anyone who reads the private version deserves to know the full story without edits. Second, as I mentioned before, this is all stream of consciousness writing with little regards to editing. If you get mad at something I write, like before I’m only writing how I feel at the time in the tone I feel at the time of writing. If I’m mad at you for something you did and say hurtful things about you as I’m writing, then that’s also on you as well. With that, let’s begin.

I remember when this year started and I thought to myself there looks to be few games or really movies that have my attention coming up this year. A few like the super hero movies and a few Nintendo titles, but nothing that sticks out as a “must see” or “must have” beyond that. But I kept telling myself, wait til PAX wait til E3 and we’ll see what gets announced as the year goes on.

PAXEast had a lot of cool titles that I’m looking forward too. Daylight is a procedural-mapping horror game that takes the concept of how dungeons in Diablo 2 work and puts it into a horror game. Thus far, I’m excited and the gameplay footage I watched in the beta seemed promising. But the big draw was Transistor, created by the same developers who gave us Bastion. If you’re a real gamer who took time to play the beautiful work that is Bastion, then you know why I’m excited by Transistor. It has a similar visual style, a new character, new world, and a new method of gameplay. It looks to be combining turn-based strategy with action-RPG gameplay and the demonstration I watched got me excited for it. Shame both of these won’t be out until early next year.

Dust: An Elysian Tail was also announced to be getting a port for the PC this April. I watched some videos of the XBLA title and was genuinely excited by it, hoping that a port would be in the near future. Speaking of ports, Trials Evolution Gold edition was released for Steam this week and I’ll likely buy that once I see what the birthday money I’ll likely get next week amounts too. Hooray for XBLA ports to Steam!

There was more shown about Elder Scrolls Online, which is one of the few titles I’ve had my eye on for this year, but I’m holding out on it until I see some concrete stuff from it. It’s an MMO using the Elder Scrolls series as the setting, which is all well-and-good, but having not finished Skyrim yet, I’m not exactly jonesing for another venture into Elder Scrolls universe yet. Outside of that, nothing else really got my attention, but I wasn’t looking too hard at the stuff that was already announced. I was mostly browsing for announcements of something we haven’t heard about already. Not much in that regard.

But I’m sure most of you are here for other reasons. I said this was a personal blog and I open up with shit about gaming. What? I said that would likely happen.

I haven’t talked to Rose (the girlfriend) since yesterday after a small spat we had. I won’t go into too many details about it, I’ll just do a quick recap. A few days ago, I was invited to her d&d game. I wanted to make a slightly more complicated character for the sake of roleplaying it because I liked the idea behind his personality(s). She didn’t approve. I asked if it was cool for her to look at it when it was done before I actually submit it to the DM, and she said “sure.” The next day, after having worked on it a bit, I mentioned how work is coming along on it, and she gives me shit for not listening to her the day before about how I shouldn’t be doing it. She gets noticeably angry at me, but I didn’t focus on that because I didn’t understand what she would be angry about given that I knew I likely wouldn’t get to use this character and my work on it was mostly just to build a character for fun. In the process of chewing me out, she ends up making me feel like garbage and then after a while of being masticated, she then explains in a more calm and civil manner about why she was against the idea in the first place.

And while I get why she was upset, that’s not a good reason to shit all over me and my idea and make me feel like garbage for just trying to have a conversation about something I’m working on, A FICITONAL CHARACTER no less, in my free time. So, yeah, I’ve been maintaining radio (texting) silence for the most part since that conversation. Why? Partly because I don’t want to try and start another friendly conversation only to get chewed out again so soon after having that happen already. And I just don’t feel like talking to her right now, which is a shame because that’s also the only thing I really want to do.

So I eventually got around to talking about her. Again, it broke into another argument. And, as I expected, it resulted in us breaking up. It sort of hurts, but not nearly as bad as I expected it too… I’m more just disappointed I couldn’t do half the stuff I wanted to do. And it wasn’t even on her, it was on me for just not having my head fully there.

Now I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I had interests in moving back to Des Moines and she was part of the reason I was interested in going back. Now that interest has kind of dissolved, retardedly so. Yes, it would be better to move out of this hellhole. Yes, there are more opportunities there than there are here. But at the same time, I just no longer have the interest to go back. If anything, I’d rather go elsewhere. I just… don’t know where… or what I’m going to do yet.

I really had my heart set on this working too. I was thinking to myself this while time I was feeling like garbage and trying to get better that the next time I see her, I will make it the best day she’s ever had. Now I won’t get such an opportunity.

But mostly… I’m just tired right now. Maybe that’s from a slight bit of depression? I’ve been tired a lot lately. I don’t know why. I guess all this energy I’ve wasted in arguing with her about pointless bullshit and putting all this effort into it was just worn me out, especially so soon after that last sham of a relationship. More I think about it, the more I think I needed more time and that I wasn’t quite ready to make this jump yet.

For that, I guess I’m sorry, Rose. We should have waited and I shouldn’t have been so quick to jump into something with you so soon. It’s like going from a Mario game and into a Rock Band game right afterward, my brain just wasn’t able to process the shift in what I was doing so fast and I wasn’t prepared for what happened. And I think part of it was also due to the fact that I kept thinking about how things were, instead of how things are (and now were).

Have I learned a lesson here? I hope so. The lesson being? I honestly don’t know this time around. When we broke up the first time, the lesson was that sometimes relationships end despite your best efforts and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. This time around, I guess what I should walk away from is to not let the past haunt you so much and just get over it. Something I guess I’ve never had an easy time with.

Like I said though. I’m just tired right now and need some rest. See ya next time.