I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Every once in a while, I consider writing in this blog again. Life goes on, and for me it is largely unrecorded. The fact that I haven't had a decent camera in the last half a year doesn't help.

The last time I wrote on here I had been working at SirsiDynix for a few months. I've now been there just over a year and a half. Six months ago I moved in with some of my best friends in Provo, and I really wish I had taken pictures of our setup in the living room. Having a living room ringed with computers is probably the nerdiest I could have gotten, but it was fun while it lasted. Once again I get to move, though I'll be with guys I know not nearly so well. Such is life.

Once again that drive to get out of Provo has hit me pretty hard, constantly nagging at me. I recognize what it is this time. I felt the same thing (though much more intensely) before I got my job at SirsiDynix. I've reached dissatisfaction once again.

I'm still in my college town. I like Provo more than many do, but my feet itch. Moving this weekend shows how very difficult going elsewhere will be, but I think it would help. I would leave a lot behind, though, which is one of the many things that leaves me unsure. Fix the other problems and my feet get less itchy.

My salary is not the greatest. I have managed to make myself one of the more valuable members of my team, but you wouldn't recognize that looking at my pay. Not that it matters much—there is little mobility within the company, from what I have seen (though that depends somewhat on your skill set and ambition).

Worst of all, I have not been writing. At all. I play around with ideas, but I have not been writing the way I could and should. My one hope with the new place is that perhaps I will dedicate myself a bit more to my real work and start churning out some word count again. I so very much need to focus.

So there you go, one of those rare times in which I will actually complain a bit. Otherwise life is great. I just need to do more with it.

To the Pain

For nearly ten years, I've been a pretty consistent weight: 160 lbs, give or take a couple. There have been fluctuations, some of them major. On my mission, I actually went up to 190 after being in car areas for about six months, but by the end of my mission I was back to 160. I feel that's where I belong. In my early days of plasma donation, they claimed my weight did some pretty wild fluctuations—like up to 175 and then a few days later down to 165. They said it was stress or some garbage; I maintain it was laziness on the part of the dude using the sliding weights on the scale, since the times I jumped up to 175 he also didn't wait until the scale had properly balanced. Then there were times where I just didn't have that much to eat for an extended period of time, and I dropped to 150. Honestly, I didn't notice the loss until I stepped onto a scale. It generally didn't matter, since in a couple of weeks I'd be back home at good old 160 lbs.

Naturally, I was a bit concerned when after a month and a half working at SirsiDynix I weighed in at 170 lbs. Don't get me wrong—I don't constantly check my weight (except when they do it for me at the plasma center). I was just feeling sluggish, and then I noticed I was developing a belly. This simply will not do. So I'm doing the only thing I can do: I've started working out.

I'm only a week into my little regimen, and I hope to improve it as I go. At this point, I really have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to working out. At this point I'm doing pushups and crunches, and I guess I need to throw something else in there to properly work out my biceps. I want to improve my upper body especially, though the crunches are the most important as I will not have a belly. I refuse to. In high school I developed a habit of sucking it in wherever I went, which I like to think has helped strengthen those muscles at least a little bit even if it was never something that would give me magnificent abs.

Normally this sort of determination to exercise lasts a day or two, and then I forget. Having gone a week and kept it up is kind of a hallmark.

The point, as the title of this post indicates, is that I am incredibly sore. Like, all over. My legs are the worst right now after playing frisbee in the snow on Saturday. I am soooooooooooooooo out of shape. But hey, I feel much better sore all over than slowly turning into a mass of wobbly lard stiffly propped up by the bone structure of this spooky skeleton I keep inside me. So huzzah for working out! (Maybe it'll even last!)

On Choices and Attitude

One of the most important aspects of my personal philosophy is that everything is a choice. Granted, we can't choose what happens to us; however, we very much choose how we react to things in life. Controlling one's attitude is one of the keys to happiness, working hand-in-hand with living in harmony with the gospel. As Harold B. Lee put it, "Happiness does not depend on what happens outside of you, but on what happens inside of you. It is measured by the spirit with which you meet the problems of life."

I have been a much happier person ever since I really discovered this truth for myself instead of just hearing similar statements on attitude. Please let me be first to point out that I am not the best at applying these keys to joy. For much of this year I've been rather sullen, or at the very least not my usual happy self. (I consider happy as my normal state. I walk around just smiling pretty often.) I was quite unhappy with my financial situation and basically looked for an escape route. There were plenty of moments where I could see things in a proper light (as I recognized that I was learning quite a bit working at Wasatch Mental Health), but overall my attitude was not a joyful one. Now that I'm in a far superior situation, and having much clearer sight of things past, I can once again see that whatever unhappiness I experienced this last year was my own making. I did not choose to be happy. 

The real challenge is remembering this truth when things aren't going right. It's one of the major things I need to work on. My brother, Clint, is much better at applying these principles than I am. His current employment is, from what I saw, pretty bad—dude truly can do much better. But he's happy because he chooses to be, and he recognizes that he's learning things while he's at it. Clint's always been better at applying principles like that than I have. (I still will keep trying to eat so food doesn't go to waste, until I remember that it's more wasteful to keep eating when I ceased to enjoy the food. I pointed this out to him years ago when an economics professor made the point in class, but Clint is better at keeping that philosophy than I am.)

I guess this is a sort of New Year's resolution for me: I am going to have a relentlessly positive attitude. 

A lot of things have led up to this resolution. Seeing my brother's attitude when I visited for Christmas reminded me a lot, a sort of catalyst. Largely it's just been that I haven't really been nearly as happy as I should be, and I am well aware that that is purely my choice. I'm not nearly as satisfied with who I am right now. I used to come up with some of the most awesome dates, but I generally don't put much effort into them nowadays. But that's more symptoms than anything. Choices and outlook are at the heart of the matter. I'm going to make a lot of changes, but everything starts with having the right attitude. 

And attitude is a choice like most everything else in this life.

Project Updates

What's this? Is Alex actually starting to update his blog regularly? I might be. Maybe I am. If nothing else, that is my intention. I might even get the European Excursion posts finished up. We'll see.

I'm working on several projects at once right now. On top of that, I've started a new job that requires me to learn a lot of stuff in completely unfamiliar territory. (Side note: I'm liking the job well enough so far. SirsiDynix is a good company with a lot of good people. There's a lot to learn, but I'm starting to feel fairly comfortable now that I'm figuring out how to learn.) Anywho, following are my active projects and the status of each.

Moving In: It's not the grandest of places, but I figure I'll likely be staying in my current apartment for awhile. It's relatively cheap, close to a lot of my daily needs, and I've got a decent amount of space. (Granted, if the guy in the next room moves out, I am so taking his spot. His room is huge.) The fact that I've lived with most of my stuff in storage for the past year is probably an important factor in this flurry of re-establishing myself and wanting to make a space that is actually mine. On the first day here, I reorganized the room to my liking and brought up one of the bookcases stored in the garage. Right now there are only a few books on the shelves—along with a lot of games and ceramics—but considering that I hauled five boxes of books over here, I'm sure that won't last long. Unpacking and organizing everything is going to be a challenge. I've already found a couple of items half-forgotten that I will once more need to find place for. However, those things won't have a place until my clothes all have hangers. Hopefully I'll manage to put a sizable dent in this project over the long weekend. In any case, I'm not living out of boxes anymore.

Rise of the Colos: This project is on hold for the time being, so I guess it's not really active. Still immensely important to me. Sadly, I haven't touched it since July except briefly here and there, mostly in notes on where I've noticed mistakes in the story, things I'd like to change, and holes that still need filling even after years of working on this book off and on for several years. I will pick it up again after I write my short story for The Crimson Pact, so definitely no later than the beginning of February (when the story's due). After such a long time not writing at all, I felt I needed something fresh to get me jump-started.

Night Dragons of Eternal Fire: Don't be fooled by the title—it has nothing to do with the book. I intended to do a NaNoWriMo this year, but have found myself so terribly sidetracked that the project will go well into December and for all I know could even spill into January. It's a middle-grade novel (generally aimed at kids ages 8-12), so it'll be relatively short, probably shorter even than the standard NaNo. It's the first of what will be a series, one I came up with the frame work for years and years ago but haven't touched otherwise. It has me excited to write again.

The Ultimate Board Game of Ultimate Destiny: Someday I need to come up with an actual name for this game. Although the game has never had a physical incarnation, it's currently up to Version 3.6. It started off as a game that would be completely different every time because the scenarios determined the point of the game (a cool aspect I'd like to use in a future game). However, the scenarios I came up with were far too humdrum and the mechanics far too complicated to be manageable, let alone fun. Thus the game morphed into something even less exciting but equally unplayable since it utilized most of the same features minus the one that at least made the game sound interesting. Finally it reached its current version, which I think has much more promise than any of the others. The main issue with the game is that it requires a lot of cards, more than I'm really comfortable with for a board game. That, and the strategy aspect is not particularly strong, which makes the game far less interesting. Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't, but I'm not going to give any more details on it here right now.

The Unnamed Game: I don't even have a cool title for this game. The Ultimate Board Game of Ultimate Destiny 2? Completely unrelated, though I did try to bring in the characters from the other game at one point. This one has a lot more promise than my other attempt at the board game making world. For one thing, it has viable mechanics already. However, I'm very much in the honeymoon stage with this idea, so everything looks beautiful right now. It's a strategy game that combines aspects of Settlers of Catan, Risk, and a few other games (along with what I hope is original stuff, too, though there are games that I haven't played that look mighty similar). Like Settlers, the board is made of various hexes that produce the resources you'll need to build your empire, though there is a bit more randomness to the board than Settlers provides. This is achieved primarily through alternate set up styles (the usual way would be the regular large hexagon) and the fact that you do not use all the hexes when making the board, so some resources might be scarcer than usual, or even non-existent. However, I found congruent mechanisms for variation in game play in Twilight Imperium, so I hope that this does not simply end up as a dumbed-down fantasy version of the same. I knew almost nothing of the game until I looked at it for inspiration as I knew vaguely it had some similarities (which turned out to be numerous similarities, though I believe the differences will be significant). Risk was part of the inspiration for this game, so I list it; however, the fighting and conquering aspect is closer to Axis and Allies, and the fighting is based largely off that game except that this one requires 8-sided dice rather than the standard six. I was going to go on into the more exciting and interesting aspects of the game, the ones that really help set it apart, but it's late and now's really not the time to go publishing those ideas. Maybe I'll talk of it some other time. In any case, it's the project I usually work on when I'm on break from more important things.

Okay, clearly I talk way too much. However, I must make an announcement, namely to help myself stay true to my goals and actually finish these projects. From now until New Year's, I am going on a Starcraft fast. I love the game and usually keep my playing to the social level, but it definitely takes up too much of my writing time. I need to focus, and this will be a major help in that regard. So there you go, no more Starcraft for me this year. Project update: finished.

Addendum (25 Nov): I've changed the Starcraft fast to a simple restriction that I'm not allowed to play until I've written at least 2000 words that day. This restriction has rollover penalties, so if I don't make it one day I can't play until I've made up for the lost word count. This will pretty much amount to the same thing except possibly on the weekends.

Shouts Out

I am finally on my own two feet again. As anyone who actually reads this blog probably knows, I've been half-broke for the past year and change. I went to Europe for a month knowing that I'd be coming back to no job and no real income. This became really scary when that trip ended up costing about a thousand dollars more than I had expected. One of the worst aspects was that I am really bad at job hunting. I mean really bad. Thus began my life as a hobo, though really it was more of a squatter situation. For this post, I really just want to throw some shouts out to the people who helped me over the past year.

Brian Bean, Brian Zundel, Dallin Regehr, and Nick Green were extremely generous giving me a place to stay in my old ward at Carriage Cove. I enjoyed camping out in your living room with all my stuff crammed in my car.

Aaron Petterborg put me up for the next few months, giving me a place I could more easily think of as home even though I was still just camping out in the living room. You refused to take the little bit of rent money I could offer, so I'm glad I was at least able to help ensure you got to work on time while you were going through the early twitterpation stage of your relationship with your eternal companion.

When it came time for me to vamoose to make way for more important people in the apartment, Cavan Helps gave me a place to stay for a paltry rent. I was finally out of the living room, namely because we actually did things there. Still camping. I miss the globe-hopping road trips with Rosz, since we were both unemployed. It was a good set up, but alas not to remain long as the landlord was renting the place out contrary to stupid zoning ordinances and we were evicted shortly thereafter. At least I had a place to stay until summer.

In May, Sam Hunt helped me get a job at Wasatch Mental Health after I had gone a full year unemployed. I expected to be there only a couple of months—through the end of summer at most—but stayed on for half a year. As much as I made fun of it (I mean, I was driving a van with the power of a bachelor's degree after all), I actually did find I enjoyed it and the people I worked with.

Thank you all for your assistance over the past year. I couldn't have made it through without such good friends, and I am extremely grateful to have been so blessed.

Most of all, I want to give especial thanks to Bill and Mariah Petrosino. This entire time they held onto the greater part of my belongings for me. When I was unsure of whether or not I should remain in Utah or move on to new adventures, they gave me a place to stay. Bill was the catalyst in me finally getting gainful employment so that I could set off on my own again. I could not ask for better friends than these. Thank you, thank you, thank you.