I usually try to come up with some manner of clever title, but I'm not bothering this time. This will be mostly just a rambling bit of nonsense, but perhaps it will help me to get somewhere; and if I'm lucky someone else else might find it at least mildly amusing.
Of late I have spent my time at work, writing in my journal, eating and sleeping, or playing video games. (Games of choice have been Borderlands 2, DotA 2, and Guild Wars 2... I just now realized they are all sequels...) You will not a distinct lack of working on my actual writing projects in there.
I don't have--and am not going to try to create--an excuse for that, I've just been lazy and unmotivated. I haven't wanted to do much of anything lately, which has been rather terrible. Of things that have attempted to hold my interest and get me to be productive, two I think are meaningful.
It keeps being suggested to me through various people and in various ways that I should try to start a sort of tech support business. Specifically one scaled to individual use and small business operations. Why this seems like a good idea is because of the mass numbers of technologically-challenged people, and the other large mass of people who are tech-savvy, but really don't want to try and explain things to the plebes, or just don't have time to constantly be fixing their friend's machine. So I've been kicking the idea around a bit, trying to get a feel for how it might work--and perhaps more importantly, if I could make money off it without hating every moment of it.
Second thing--which is considerably more interesting--has been a game idea that quite literally sprung into my head almost fully formed. My wife and I have been working on it off and on this week, and I hope to get it into at least a play-testable state by this weekend. I won't reveal too much at this point, but suffice to say it is a card-based game revolving around gaining political influence at court, and uses a tarot deck as the primarily played cards. Provided I can make the game work and balance, I'll start doing play-tests with my gaming friends, and if it actually turns out to be enjoyable at all then I think I might try to Kickstart it into something meaningful.
Aside from these, work has been mind-numbingly boring and exhausting as anything I've ever done. For the longest time I could not figure out how incredibly simple office work could manage to make me so tired, but yesterday I think I finally figured it out. My mind wants to run, but simple office work forces it to crawl.
I need to concentrate on a simple repetitive task until it is finished; unfortunately it is in no possible way capable of actually holding my interest, so I have to constantly exert willpower to force my thoughts back on task. When I have to do this near-constantly for 5 to 8 hours, it becomes a near-painful drain on my energy. If on top of the mindless repetitive tasks I have to try and coordinate and communicate with other people on them, then it just becomes something of my own personal hell. Not only do I need to stay on task; I now have to slow down thoughts to a level that I can interact with coworkers on, and try to explain what I'm doing and why--which is hard enough to do with intellectual people and without any insult intended I do not work with intellectual people.
So long story short, work is way more exhausting than it has any right to be, which leads to me not having energy at the end of the day to force myself to sit and write, or read, or hit the gym, or basically anything else. Something here needs to change... Please?
-Matthew
