Time. I has none.
I would like to know exactly where the past year has gone. I don’t think I lost any of it, so asking for it back would be decidedly difficult, but I certainly seem to have been mentally absent for most of it… I’ve been looking back over a number of things lately and realizing that most of them happened almost a whole year ago. It’s actually been nearly a year since I last picked up my Wacom tablet and doodled anything; nearly a year since I stopped working at Cyan and started working where I am now; almost two years since my last Mysterium… where has this time gone?!
I’m trying to figure out if the past year being a complete blur is a really good thing or a really bad thing, honestly. On the one hand, it’s really good, because that means my job - which takes up most of my day anyway - doesn’t suck so much that I want to hang myself when I get home every day (okay, none of my jobs have ever really been that bad, but there have certainly been days that have done nothing good for me). On the other hand, I wonder if perhaps my job is so similar from day to day that the passage of time just seems to slip under my radar as each day goes by in a blur. Personally, I prefer thinking of it as the former possibility, because it’s not only less depressing, but it also takes into account just how much I’ve been doing this past year. My project load both inside and outside the workplace has been borderline obscene, and I don’t see it getting much smaller anytime soon (as I’ve mentioned before). I think I’ve just had so much to keep me busy that each day has been a blur, but not in the monotonous “what the hell day is it?” sort of way that implies that my job is sucking the life out of me. It’s been a blur in the “what the hell happened to Tuesday?!” sort of way that turns every project into a race against the clock, much to my continual annoyance.
If I were to make an incredibly belated new year’s resolution, it would be to try and pay more attention to the actual passage of time, and maybe take some time out each day - or at least each week - to do something for myself that has no bearing on any projects that I’m working on for the Myst community or for my job. Drawing, modeling, reading, writing (like, actual writing, not this philosophical commentary on life and video games I’m doing here)… anything constructive that I can do for myself to make time for me over the next year, so that I don’t suddenly look back again and go “WTF happened to 2008?! I had plans!!!”
On a similar note, I may be dropping a few projects in an attempt to cut down on the number of responsibilities I have to juggle. I’ll probably stay on the Mysterium committee, and you’d have to kill me before I dropped DPWR, but simply out of lack of time I may have to drop a few things like moderating the MOUL forums and pounding the pavement for help with the Guild of Archivists (which I wasn’t doing a very good job of anyway). Once I finally finish assembling Issue 12 of The Archiver, I’ll probably try to find someone I can pawn my Pages templates off to in the event that the publication starts up again in the future, because the past week has rather plainly illustrated that I just don’t have the time to sit down and fiddle with content layouts and image placements that I did when I started the thing back in 2006. I’ll also have to put a few of my more hair-brained ideas like learning Objective-C for the hell of it on the back burner while I bang out some more practical things that have been bouncing around in my head for 6 months or more. I’ve never been good at project management - ask anyone I went to ITT with about how completely insane I get when handed something like a simple “build a bathroom sink” quiz in 3d modeling class - but I think I’ve finally managed to over-do it to the point where I just can’t get anything done due to how many things I’m trying to do. It’s slowly driving me crazy, and it’s started affecting my productivity when it comes to even the smaller things that I need to do.
It’s funny how a complete break from one’s normal routine makes them look back at it from the outside and go “dude, I’ve got some problems to deal with…”  I’ll have more on what I did this weekend in an upcoming post, but for now, suffice it to say, it was an interesting and even enlightening weekend that I wasn’t expecting at all. However, I’ll save that for later today since a) I have to get some work done and b) I don’t want to flood the MystBlogs feed ;).
April 28th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
It’s actually been more than a year since you doodled.. the last thing you made was my birthday present.. in august.
Honestly, I believe time has flowed quickly for everyone. Right now it is very slow though. I hope it stays like that for me. I want to be able to do more things in the day.. But I know it won’t.
And yes, you8 do need to do something for yourself every day. DPWR doesn’t count.
I want to get you meditating too.. I think it would be of great benefit to you.
.. Also, I am going to kill your blog. This is the fourth time I’ve recieved the “No valid entry” error.. when everything was filled out correctly.