A Good Spin on Mid-May
It's been a hectic last week. There's been a few personal setbacks which caused a tremendous amount of stress, Kay's been working super-overtime lately because a huge amount of last-minute work has come in at the business factory, and we've both been attending to the last of the semester's work load. It's all getting done, but I've had to drop the game I'm running and although that's made it much easier to focus, it's a drag. I'll be honest, though, I think it was a bit of a bust on my end; there was a lot of good work from the players, but I couldn't get the spark to fire for myself. So, gaming is on hiatus for a while for me, and I'm not sure for how long. I've been spending a lot of time depressed, and the gaming schedule has been unexpectedly difficult for me, even going into late Spring. I have a few major writing goals, and maybe I ought to focus on those, since a gaming project takes up a huge amount of mental space. I have to assume that I just wasn't as fully invested as I ought to have been to make things work.
But, you know, classwork is over on Tuesday. The work I'm doing to help will mostly just be over before noon, today. I have some writing I want to do terribly, and this will be the first time in a few years I actually do have the freedom to do that which coincides with an energy level that supports it. Considering being able to write actually excites me, and kind of threatens to lift the anxiety I feel constantly surrounded with, and it actually seems a little too good to be true. If I can write a few small pieces of creative work, I feel like I can really move into a Fall Semester teaching schedule in a really good place. Who knows, after that?
Academically, I think I want to spring board off of some previous work - my thesis, to be specific. I'd been reading some academic work on vaporwave in particular, and I think that the time is ripe for cyberpunk theory that transcends basic musing on bodies and machines or trying to determine what the political axis of the sci-fi of the 80's and 90' (especially since I have an answer I'm using to drive my work). There's some other stuff which probably won't happen but I'll take a stab at, but really shouldn't go into more detail in until I know for sure whether it would or wouldn't fly. And so on, and so on.
I know that most of the stuff I've tried to do hasn't worked out, especially when it comes to writing projects. But you know what? Back in 2005 - 7, I had an idea in my head that I wanted to work out. The work I was doing was entirely without access to academic resources, but the rough outline seemed good. In 2016 and very early 2017, I finished my graduate thesis - an essay ten years in coming. And even now I'm looking at it and thinking, "I can do more of this, better." and so much of that comes down to picking a project and really trying to focus on it. The kind of access to help and resources I have now wasn't something I could easily expect back then, and I wasn't nearly as mentally put-together then, either. So I'm interested to see what I'm able to make happen now.
But, you know, classwork is over on Tuesday. The work I'm doing to help will mostly just be over before noon, today. I have some writing I want to do terribly, and this will be the first time in a few years I actually do have the freedom to do that which coincides with an energy level that supports it. Considering being able to write actually excites me, and kind of threatens to lift the anxiety I feel constantly surrounded with, and it actually seems a little too good to be true. If I can write a few small pieces of creative work, I feel like I can really move into a Fall Semester teaching schedule in a really good place. Who knows, after that?
Academically, I think I want to spring board off of some previous work - my thesis, to be specific. I'd been reading some academic work on vaporwave in particular, and I think that the time is ripe for cyberpunk theory that transcends basic musing on bodies and machines or trying to determine what the political axis of the sci-fi of the 80's and 90' (especially since I have an answer I'm using to drive my work). There's some other stuff which probably won't happen but I'll take a stab at, but really shouldn't go into more detail in until I know for sure whether it would or wouldn't fly. And so on, and so on.
I know that most of the stuff I've tried to do hasn't worked out, especially when it comes to writing projects. But you know what? Back in 2005 - 7, I had an idea in my head that I wanted to work out. The work I was doing was entirely without access to academic resources, but the rough outline seemed good. In 2016 and very early 2017, I finished my graduate thesis - an essay ten years in coming. And even now I'm looking at it and thinking, "I can do more of this, better." and so much of that comes down to picking a project and really trying to focus on it. The kind of access to help and resources I have now wasn't something I could easily expect back then, and I wasn't nearly as mentally put-together then, either. So I'm interested to see what I'm able to make happen now.