So the strangest thing happened to me this morning.

As many of you know, I’ve been a pretty avid World of Warcraft player for a long time – almost five years, off and on, as I’ve been able to keep paying for time cards.

It’s something I usually have a fair amount of fun with, although it’s as subject as anything else to the effects of my moon swings and so forth that I’ve discussed here in other contexts. 

Right now, I’m on the last few days of the last time card I bought, just before I ended up firing the incompetent cowards that I was renting my taxi from.  I’ve got maybe 10 days or so left.

Usually  that would leave me with a sense of urgency and intense engagement in the game.  After all, I paid for it and I don’t know when or even IF I’ll have the chance to get back to it, and I’ve spent a pretty obscene amount of time on it over the years, so it feels kind of wasteful to just blow it off.  Like spending a half-decade getting reasonably decent at a musical instrument only to abandon it on a whim.

I logged in this morning…and just went “meh.”  Plenty to do in Azeroth for me, I’ve got 8 leveling/active toons on my main server, plus a handful of others scattered across various other servers where friends and family play.  So it’s not like there’s nothing to do.

Somehow, though, it seems really…pointless.  A waste of valuable time. 

Which of course it is, that’s the whole POINT.  It’s a game, a hobby, a side-bar that is intended to do NOTHING but give me some down-time, some non-productive time.  On one hand that is a pretty guilty pleasure considering my current circumstances; on the other hand All Work And No Play etc., and it’s actually healthy and natural and normal and reasonable, even when I’m broke as hell, to want and even need some diversionary, non-productive pleasure time.

Yet…I’m just not “feeling it,” as the kids are saying nowadays.  I literally couldn’t make myself care enough about my little mini-me’s that I’ve spent the last half-decade nurturing and growing and watching them change and mature to go running around leveling my crafting skills or running daily quests or even doing random dungeons for easy badge rewards.

It’s sort of funny, because when I don’t have game time – when I can’t play – I’m always thinking about various ways I could be creating new WoW-centric content for this site that will draw traffic and make people think I’m cool and all that.  Then when I have the option, I end up just playing and trying to advance my game rather than following through on my bright ideas to turn it into money.

This is pretty typical dysfunctional/addictive behavior.  I’m aware of that :)  It just..strikes me.

I’ve been going through a period of intense self-examination these last few weeks.  Various events in my life, including my mom’s passing over the last holiday season and some family drama that I really don’t care to go into here or anywhere else, have kind of shaken a lot of old dirt loose from the bottom of my mind and left me to reconsider (or just plain consider) a lot of things that I hadn’t before.  Dots are being connected that I’d been missing because I was too close to the picture – kind of like holding a Seurat painting up close to your face and trying to figure out what it is from just looking at a bunch of circles – and that’s been a very healthy and positive thing for me.  While I don’t like to call people out by name on this blog when they do something good or nice or right for me out of the kindness of their hearts, the people I’m staying with at the moment have not only been extremely generous in opening their home, but also in being friends to me, people who are willing to listen to me vent or leave me be or offer advice as whichever of the above seems appropriate, and while I’m very, very bad at saying things like this face to face, I hope they know as well as I do that they’ve had a positive impact on my life that will last me the rest of it.

So I’m kind of left wondering whether my lack of interest in playing out the remainder of my game time is reflective of this recent growth and change in my mental state, and I felt like doing some writing, and a little graphic design as well, and so there you have it.  My mental state is reasonably decent, I’m not horribly depressed at the moment.  My financial situation hasn’t improved a bit, but that’s life.  I need to find a way of putting myself and this site over to people that doesn’t sound like I’m panhandling for money that I haven’t earned.  I do good work here, and good work deserves to be rewarded.

I deserve to be rewarded.  I deserve to earn a living being who I am and using my best talents the way I best see fit.

I’m gonna make it happen, one way or the other.