Struggle Is Real
It is Monday morning after my week and some change holiday break, and I have to tell you… the struggle to exist in the world is real. I am hoping through that yesterday I ultimately went through the worst. As I said yesterday morning, we set an alarm in an attempt to force ourselves to shift vaguely in the direction of a schedule. As a result I pretty much sleep walked through yesterday, and found myself generally staring in the direction of things rather than actually participating. This was doubly awkward since we were having our last “christmas” event of the year with my mom-in-law coming over. I tried desperately to keep up with the conversation, ultimately failing. The small wonder however was the fact that she brought her laptop for me to look at because it wasn’t working. Sure enough the first time it attempted to boot, it hung after login. However on the second shutdown and restart everything went normally, and as a result I busied myself staring at its screen for the remainder of her visit. I did the normal gamut of fiddling… checking her antivirus to make sure it was up to date, and patching as much as I could with windows update. A computer requires significantly less interaction than a human being, and that was ultimately what I was banking on.
The ultimate problem is… that she has no internet connection. What I mean by that is that she does not pay for internet at her house, but instead piggy backs off the wifi of her grand neice. This is perfectly find mind you, it is not like she was war driving one day and hijacked a wifi signal. The problem being that there is roughly a half football field of distance between her house and the nieces house, and our RV pad is smack dab in the middle. It was my hope that either we would put in wifi at our RV eventually, or set up a network of signal boosters to piggyback the signal across. The problem is since she doesn’t really know how technology works, it is hard to explain why her internet connection sometimes works fine and other times not at all. Basically it shouldn’t be working at all, and it is by sheer dumb luck that you can pick up a wifi signal from that sort of distance. The problem also being that she cannot differentiate between telling us something is wrong with her laptop and the software itself and her internet connection. This is the truth with most of our family, they know that facebook isn’t working but are of little to no help to actually diagnose over the phone as to why that is the case.
Paladins Everywhere
The problem with a big goal is once I accomplish it, I end up floundering for a bit trying to find something else to focus my attention on. In the past many of the times when I have left a game it was because I completed some big item that I was grinding my ass off to achieve…. and lost interest after finally getting it. I know it is in my nature to feel let down after finally getting something, and I am trying really hard to not let Draenor Pathfinder be that way as well. Since I finally can fly around, I have been focusing for a bit on trying to push up some of my post 90 characters on Argent Dawn and my highest of those is Exeter my original Alliance Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I took him from 94 to 98 and am now starting Nagrand, where I hope to finish up. I like finishing in Nagrand because gear wise I end up in a fair better position than if I grind the hell out of Spires of Arak. After the initial leveling in Draenor I have followed the pattern of swapping zones every time the game prompted me that the next one was available. So in my case that would be 94 for Talador, 96 for Spires of Arak and 98 for Nagrand. Doing this ends up with me in a mishmash of gear, and a bunch of abandoned quests, but seems to also be the fastest possible way to churn through the content.
Ultimately my goal is not to experience the quest content, because I have already done that several other times. The goal is to level as fast as possible, and I guess in theory I could simply just do the dungeon queue as a tank and be done with it. That is absolutely an option I will consider, but yesterday I absolutely was not competent enough to be responsible for the lives of anyone other than myself… and at times even that part was questionable. I died an awful lot yesterday, and spent probably as much time running back to my corpse as I did actively questing. The problem being that while every fiber in my being told me that I really just wanted to go to sleep, I knew that would only prolong the horribleness and make my first day back at work sheer hell. So I continued trying to busy my mind. While attempting to level the paladin we searched Netflix for something anywhere near as compelling as Making a Murderer, only to strike out multiple times. In the evening we ended up watching a documentary called Dear Zachary which was extremely good.. and moving… but I would not suggest watching unless you are really ready to cry. We ended up closing the evening out watching the Netflix comedy series Master of None because seriously… after that documentary we both needed a laugh. We ended up shutting down around 10 and making it to bed…. only to sit there and talk for awhile as neither of us seemed to be sleepy anymore.
I hate my brain so much at times, because through out the day all it did was complain about how tired it was… and begged me to go to sleep… and now that I am finally read for it to shut down it is acting like a spoiled toddler crossing its arms and holding its breath. I wish so much that I had a normal relationship with sleep… that it was just one of those things that happened naturally for me. My entire life it has been a struggle to actually have a normal sleep schedule. Every fiber of my being is wired to be awaken during the night… because I feel far more alive after the sun goes down than at any other part in my existence. The sun and I really do not get along, and I think in theory I could be happy working night shift. The problem being I work the sort of job that happens during the day time, and I have tried for years to become the kind of person that functions during the day. There are all manner of tricks that I play upon myself and an absolutely silly amount of caffeine and energy drinks that I use to force myself to remain viable and cognizant during the hours I am supposed to be. But my brain is a brat and refuses to function like a normal human being, and I get so tired of playing the game where I am laying comfortably in bed… and every neuron is firing wildly trying to keep me from achieving a restful nights sleep. Fuck you brain… you are an asshole. But hopefully I got enough sleep to be mostly functional on this first day back from break.