 nearly true
posted by Christopher on 12.12.2004 - 5:30 pm
i was a long-time online chatroom veteran by the time i was 25... i had met maybe 30 people in real life and had seen the rise and fall of an actual business (and two actual live-in relationships) during the previous four years. spending nearly 14 hours a day chatting gave me some pretty damn good insight into what to look out for. when i was ready to start looking for another relationship, I ended up devising a set of 'guide questions' to weed out undesirables, and figured out all the red flags to keep an eye out for. i guess it was almost like conducting interviews to fill a position.
it sounds freakish, but it worked... something like 200 (girls?) and six months later, i met jenny, and we've been living really happily together for four years now. neither of us has hit a chatroom since.
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 All used up ...
posted by Dante on 12.13.2004 - 7:35 am
As I mentioned last week, work has taken a fairly significant bite out of my 'Deal' time. But the comic hasn't been the only facet of my life to take a pretty profound hit in the last few months. I've also sacrificed all but the smallest handful of my favorite TV shows. In most instances I wrote them off as being 'in decline' or on a new night that's harder to watch. These are excuses for rejection that only a TV show would accept, since I don't actually have to deliver that lame rationalization in an argument. Some of the shows may fight back by getting themselves cancelled. I've had my heart broken by network execs so many times, this time I'm going to distance myself early, to lessen the hurt. (How was that one for the champion dumb-jerk excuse?)
And my video game time has become a joke. I sit in the store staring longingly at Knights of the Old Republic II, but I can't force myself to buy it. Am I afraid of being let down by a sequel? Anyone who knows me recognizes how comically low I set the bar in terms of my entertainment choices. Is my geek credibility no longer as important to me as it once was? Having the hot, new game on release day only curries geek-cred if you actually pop the damn thing in a console and play it right away. No, this consumer apathy is borne out of a fear that I won't make the time to play a new game until I could have bought it as a platinum hit and save myself some cash. Does that make me: cheap, a realist, or just boring?
I'm going to opt for boring, since all work and no play takes away any ability I have to relate to other human beings or devise topical humor. I have to get my hobbies back, because that's where I find my edge, at least the side of it that other people might find remotely interesting. Bad examples of database design, or functions that weren't designed with maximum reusability in mind (though relatively timeless) aren't funny in a generically approachable way. People might laugh, but it'll only be because I use some metaphor about monkeys throwing their poop. They won't laugh because they get the joke – they’ll laugh because, in their heads, they've got this mental picture of monkeys in an office setting, maybe in oxfords and ties, feces flying. Like those food fights in bad teen movies, but this food has been digested. I just took that to a fairly disgusting place, and I'm sorry. It does serve as an example of why I need to get out more though.
No more. I've isolated a new year's resolution midway through December. In 2003 I neglected my work in favor of everything else, and in 2004 I completely reversed the scale. '05 is going to be the year I find balance. I should probably start working on that one now ... but if I start now, can I still call it a "New Year's" resolution?
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