May 9, 2012

I’ve been staring at this post for a while, and written and rewritten it a few times. This isn’t the first time I’ve written this post, or posts like it, and somehow or another, they never end up actually getting published. Is this the lucky post that survives the culling of my anxiety?

We’ll see.

Keeping it short might make it easier - I tend to get verbose, and then decide I need to go back, edit, and rearrange everything I say until I can eventually convince myself not to publish at all. I’ve talked about this before in other posts about anxiety.

Words are tough. Lots of people don’t agree on what some words mean, and while that’s okay, it makes it a bit tough to just toss out a word, and expect universal understanding. Even if I said the word “red”, all of you reading this are likely to imagine different things thinking about that word (for me, it’s a red brick).

So with that being said…hi. I’m heteroflexible.

More or less what this means to me (as both of these terms have some debate around what they mean and apply to) is that while I am primarily heterosexual and attracted to women, I am also (physically) attracted to (some) men (depending upon situation), as well as (some) people outside the gender binary.

Look at all those parentheses! See how much I have to caveat all of that? It’s tough to explain sometimes! Human sexuality is confusing and highly individualistic, and trying to pick and chose words to describe yourself is fraught with peril, because to some people, heteroflexible is just another word for bisexual - and I don’t identify as bisexual. To other people, heteroflexible is just a way to say bicurious - and that’s not really right, either.

Additionally, I also identify as queer.

By some definitions, queer is pretty exclusively about being homosexual - and I’m not that. To me, labeling myself queer is done to encompass non-normative heterosexuality as well as kink/BDSM. These are parts of my life.

I’ve directly told maybe a dozen people this total, though I’ve alluded to it with others. My best friend is gay, and I’ve never told him after realizing this about myself a few years ago. I have a hard time thinking about sharing this part of my personality/life with people who have known me as nothing but heterosexual/heteronormative my whole life.

Sexuality is constantly evolving and shifting. What you are today may not be what you are five years from now. If you asked me five years ago if I’d be writing this post and trying to work myself up into publishing it, I’d have laughed quite a lot, because while I have always been quite open minded, I was pretty solidly on the side of “yay women, boo dudes and everyone else” then. 

I’m not posting this to draw attention to myself, or to get praise, or anything of the sort. I guess mostly I’m writing this because there’s a certainty that comes with me casting words I type into this blog off into the ocean that is the Internet. This is who I am, and I am admitting it out loud.

Pushing the post button and walking away for a bit.

9:29pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wLCUk5J
(Notes: 10)
  
March 23, 2012
Anxiety and Friendship

I had a pretty upsetting discussion yesterday with someone that I had considered a friend. 

The very simple version is that this friend has made a number of comments to me via different mediums over the past few months, comments which have bothered or insulted me due to them insulting my lifestyle choices, my entertainment choices, or just simply my intellect. A recent comment was for me what finally pushed me over the edge from silence into speaking up to my friend, and saying that I felt I deserved better from someone who called me a friend.

In response to me finally being able to overcome my pretty serious anxiety enough to actually confront someone about something that was bothering me, I was told I should “deal with it because that’s how I am, and you knew that”, and told that I should not expect (nor would receive) an apology for any of the insults, because it was my fault they had happened.

How was it my fault? Well, if I’d stood up for myself sooner, this friend would have stopped being unjustifiably rude to me.

That sounds rather nice and simple, doesn’t it? Never mind that it’s wrapped up with a healthy dose of victim blaming, or that it’s completely ignorant of how anxiety actually works for people, or that I’ve specifically said of myself that I do not seek out confrontations with people generally speaking, but especially not with people I respect or consider friends.

Rather than even attempt to empathize with my anxiety issues, and understand that “tell me to shut up and I will” is not something that just everyone can do whenever they feel like it, this friend laid it all at my feet, and then walked away instead of trying to fix anything at all. Why? Because they’re an asshole to everyone, and everyone around them should simply learn to adapt, rather than they remotely consider that they may be wrong about something and learn how to apologize.

I should just “get over it.”

Thanks, friend! I didn’t realize that anxiety was something I could just “get over”! I’m really glad you had the forthrightness to tell me this to my face, because nobody else in my life has ever done that for me! Here I thought I needed counseling to get over the fact that I have panic attacks sometimes thinking about going into a new fucking restaurant, but I just needed to “get over it”!

That’s going to save me so much time in my life! I won’t have to spend every other moment worrying if I’m doing something wrong, making a fool out of myself, offending someone, or putting myself in a position where any of those things are likely to increase.

You know what, friend? Anxiety isn’t just something you “get over”. Counseling for it exists for a reason. Medication exists for it for a reason. Panic attacks exist.

You know what else? It doesn’t make me a weaker person than you, it doesn’t make you a better person than me.

It makes me stronger than you, friend, because I don’t have to gird myself and my fragile ego every day with an armor made of chain mail anger, pushing everyone’s buttons around me. It means I worry about shit you can’t even conceive of, and I still manage to function in my day to day life.

Is my life more challenging than someone who doesn’t have anxiety? Absolutely. Have you ever sat paralyzed in a restaurant over what to order, not because you’re not sure you’ll like the new food you want to try, but because you’re not sure how to pronounce the name and are terrified of sounding stupid to the waiter who you know logically doesn’t give a single fuck about how you pronounce their food so long as he gets a good tip? No? Okay, then sit down and shut the fuck up, because you have no understanding of what my life is like.

This isn’t something you just “get over”. This is a part of my life, and I go to counseling (and eventually will be on medication) so that way I can begin to even approach some aspects of life like a “normal” person does. But you know what? I still have friends, I have a fucking kickass job, I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, and I’m an adult person to who doesn’t deserve to be treated like garbage when you know how hard it is for me to stand up to someone treating me like that.

Do I expect a ton of special treatment for it? No. I don’t need you to hold my hand and tiptoe around me because you might be hurting my precious feelings - because another thing, friend? I don’t get insulted very easily, and yet you managed it a half dozen times in as many months. Why? Because I trusted you and thought you’d understand what it was like to live something other than a vanilla hetero cisgender white male lifestyle.

You know what would be awesome instead of special treatment? Some empathy when I finally managed to get up the internal strength to deal with the shitstorm I knew talking to you would generate. Some sort of respect for the challenges I have every day - challenges I’ve written about on this blog a number of times, and spoken about on Twitter with some regularity.

You know what else could help? Maybe not blaming things on people for their anxiety, because if you think I don’t know that a “normal person” could’ve “solved” this issue to your satisfaction months ago, you’re simply wrong. I know what “normal” should look like, and I’m not it. Maybe instead of being an asshole to me about the fact that I’d taken so long to confront you, you could’ve just said sorry instead, because you were a rude person, not tried to blame your rudeness on my anxiety - because you know what? I only own my inability to speak up to you when you’re being rude. YOU own the fact that you are consistently a rude, hateful, and offensive person to everyone around you, and that you think everyone should simply “deal” because that’s who you are. You’re not funny when you’re offensive, you’re simply offensive, and it makes me and many other people online not want to be around you, talk to you, or deal with you in any fashion. 

For everyone else - if you have a friend with anxiety, perhaps maybe you should try talking to them. Everyone processes this stuff differently. This doesn’t mean you need to handle them with kid gloves, or that you need to tread lightly lest you trigger panic attacks, but maybe learning a tiny bit about them and their problems would help you understand how you could help, or at least not actively make things worse.

10:38am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wIRFAUa
(Notes: 15)
  
March 18, 2012
Cheers

Apologies in advance, I’ve been drinking and am in an introspective and admittedly very depressed mood. Feel free to pass this one up.

Isolation.

I hate that word. It’s always on my mind, because it’s an inescapable part of my day to day life.

I am isolated where I live. My anxiety prevents me from easily being able to rectify this, and the only peer group that I feel like I’d fit in (which is that of a local game shop) is already heavily invested in my ex-girlfriend. I don’t see that being a healthy thing for me any more than continuing to live with her has really been a healthy thing.

How many of you wake up on any given day, and know that it’s entirely possible that for that day, a full 24 hour span, you may not see a single other living person who cares about you in any sense of the word? This is me almost every single day.

I live like a hermit in my own head.

I have the internet. I can email people, or IM, or Mumble or games, Skype, Facebook…a nigh infinite number of ways to communicate spills out at me every single time I look at my phone and my computer screen.

I won’t say that it doesn’t help, because that’s not true. It helps a lot. Knowing there are people out there who even for only seconds a day I may bump into on Twitter, a collision course of a humorous tweet and the laugh it causes, helps an awful lot. But in a way, all this really ends up being is casting bottles into the ocean - at the start of every day, at the end of every night, I’m still on my own desert island with no realistic hope of a passing ship.

I’m a princess imprisoned at the top of the tower, unable to save myself, and relying on others to save me is a fruitless endeavor.

For those of you reading this, perhaps you’re biting back the reply “Well, fix it! Change something - this is a problem of your own creation, a prison of your own making, and you have the power to change it!”

Sure I do. I’m the only one who really does, because expecting other people to fix my problems is self-centered and useless.

You can go ahead and tell that to the years of depression, of anxiety, of social fear and feeling for all the world like a pariah even when amongst friends.

You can tell that to all the hateful, spiteful people throughout my life that’ve done nothing but let me down and use me, that have abandoned me, that have betrayed me and my trust.

You probably can’t even fathom how difficult it really is to let any sort of counselor into the fucked up and overgrown garden that is my head. It’s not just talking, it’s lowering layers of defenses I didn’t even know I had, layers of misplaced trust stacked on top of layers of lies I tell myself just to function.

Maybe you can. Maybe you’re just as fucked up as me. I hope for your sake that you’re not, because I wouldn’t wish this (or anything like it) on anyone else.

I wish I could just snap my fingers. It’s all I can do to go to counselling, to keep the hope alive that someday I won’t feel like this inside.

When I was a little kid, my favorite TV show (according to my mom, as I have no recollection of this) was Cheers. Apparently I loved the show, and would wander around the house humming the theme song. I’ve looked it up on Wikipedia, and for the life of me, I can’t remember a single damn thing about the show, or any of the characters - just the theme song.

At the end of the day, I want to be somewhere (mentally, physically, and emotionally) where people know my name.

2:12am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wIAPx5T
March 11, 2012
Bunny

This story is sort of tough to talk about. It’s also rather lengthy, and sad.

My ex (now roommate, soon to be not roommate) got a rabbit about two and a half years ago. I’m not really familiar with rabbit breeds, but this rabbit is really adorable - he’s all black/gray, long-haired, and has very big, fuzzy ears. He was apparently a tough breed to find, so we had to go find him from a breeder. This all happened before I moved to MN, before we split, and before we were even living together - she was still living at home with family.

After we moved to MN, as with most people who move in together, we learned new things about each other that the previous two years of dating hadn’t really exposed us to. For me, she learned that I have days where I’m intensely anti-social, anxious, or depressed, and that it’s pretty much all I can do to manage to respond to texts/IMs. For her, I learned that she is intensely messy.

I’m not the neatest person in the world - I have a tendency to “narrow in” on things, be they games, work projects, a book, a TV show, etc., and I can forget to take care of some real world things for a day or so when this happens. *glances meaningfully over at a pizza box with a few empty cans on top of it.

My roommate, however, isn’t just “not neat”, she’s actively messy and lazy - messy enough to the point it bugged me, and lazy enough to the point where it drove me batshit. We fought, tried to come to arrangements, and they’d work for a  while, but she always ended up just backsliding and not doing things anymore. 

One of the big things that I noticed she was very much not good about was the fact that she didn’t clean her rabbit’s cage as regularly as she really should, and was pretty lax about checking food and water. This bothered me an awful lot - I am very much an animal person, and have been my whole life. My mom bred exotic birds when I was growing up, and I’ve never -not- had one or more pets living with me that I was responsible for. The first gift I can ever remember getting was a huskey.

So I tried to fill in around the edges, checking on the rabbit, trying to make sure he was fed/watered, and getting into fights with her every so often about her needing to clean the cage. It worked for a while.

About four months before we moved to the apartment I’m currently living in, we were at a pet store buying food & cat supplies when she decided to wander around in the “small fuzzy adorable animal section” of the store, and fell absolutely in love with another rabbit she found there.

I like making the people I’m with happy (generally at the detriment of my own happiness and well-being, but that’s another post, probably). So, I guided her away and we walked around the pet store, and I tried to lay out as honestly and inoffensively as I could that she wasn’t taking care of her current rabbit very well, and that while she was free to do what she wanted and I couldn’t very well stop her from buying the rabbit, I’d help her pay for it if she could promise me she’d take care of both it and her current rabbit in the manner both animals deserved.

She promised profusely, and I’m not going to lie, but seeing her happy overrode the logical sensible parts in my head that probably should’ve tried to talk her out of buying the second rabbit.

It didn’t, because I am a pretty stupid dude sometimes when it comes to ladies.

Her good intentions lasted roughly two weeks, and then she was pretty much back to the previous issues, except now she was neglecting two animals, and I was feeling lied to yet again. I continued making sure they were being fed and watered, picked fights to get the cages cleaned up, and so things went.

We moved to the new apartment and had a spare bedroom, so we set the rabbits up in there to help curb any feline curiosity as we really didn’t have any high flat surfaces to keep them on. Status quo - me checking on them, her not checking on them, so on and so forth. About a month into our new apartment, my roommate went out of town for seven days to go to Disney World with her family. (Jealous, I’ve never been!).

Prior to her going out of town, I made her check on the rabbits and give them extra food, an extra water bottle, etc. Or, rather I should say, I told her that I expected her to do those things as a responsible pet owner, and she told me she would.

I spent most of the six days she was gone gaming and drinking - I’m not a big drinker, but I had some good times with friends staying up late and gaming/drinking with them. I was lazy about personal hygiene for a few days, watched porn, ate at all my favorite restaurants, and generally enjoyed a bit of “bachelor” time.

At least up until day 5 of her trip when I remembered that I hadn’t checked on the rabbits since she’d left, and that while she’d promised to do the things I’d asked (extra food/water), I’d never actually made sure she did it.

She hadn’t.

I opened the door to the room the rabbits were being kept in, and just sort of stood there for a moment before I sort of slowly slid down the doorframe until I was on my knees, trying my hardest not to completely break down as I looked at the rabbit cages.

Her original rabbit was fine, albeit low on water and out of food…but the newer rabbit was not fine. 

I spent the next few hours as a complete and total emotional wreck. I called my mom asking how to explain to someone “Your pet died while I was responsible for it.” Finally, I made the call to the roommate. In retrospect, I probably should’ve waited until she came home, but I wasn’t at all sure on how she’d want the remains handled, and it wasn’t really the sort of thing I could just “wing” or alternatively ignore for a day or two.

She wasn’t happy, to say the least. She also was apparently very much not happy with the fact that I ruined the last two days of her trip to Disney World. Never once did she accept ownership of the fact that she hadn’t done what I’d said she needed to.

I handled taking the poor rabbit in to the vet and had them handle the remains, and then went home and spent the next two days in a much more subdued and less bachelor-hijinks mood. I cleaned up the apartment, did some cooking, went for a walk - pretty much everything except clean up the rabbit’s cage. Finally I couldn’t avoid it, so I went in and dealt with it, and I took her (original) rabbit out and held him for a while, and pretty much broke down again.

I drove up and picked her up from the airport, and we drove home mostly in silence. I couldn’t help but feel a rather large distance had suddenly settled in between us. We got dinner, got her unpacked, and then went to bed, and after about ten minutes of laying there with her laying pretty much on the opposite side of the mattress, I tried talking to her.

She burst into tears and started sobbing about how horrible of a person she was.

I don’t really do well with other people being said - I try to fix it, even when I can’t.

So I did something that I really shouldn’t have done - I tried to minimize and  own the blame for the fact that her rabbit had died. I told her that I’d been too lazy to check on it sooner because I was vegging out playing video games, that it wasn’t her fault, that she wasn’t a bad person.

This went on for a while, except now it turned into me being the upset one, and her slowly turning stony and silent.

I asked her if she was okay.

She said she thought we needed to take a break.

Fast forward to a week later, and she ended things officially.

Yeah. She broke up with me largely due to the fact that I’d convinced her that I was a lazy, horrible person who’d killed her rabbit.

Obviously the relationship had problems beyond that - and I’ve written about those in the past. But this? This was the actual catalyst for the breakup - me lying to her to make her feel better so she wouldn’t blame herself, and her believing that lie.

She still doesn’t really take care of her rabbit. I still go in and check on it, just because I don’t want it even remotely on my conscience that an animal suffered or died when I could’ve done something to fix it.

I wrote all of this because today I woke up to a text message from her asking if I could get out the rabbit cage that had been unused the past 8 months or so, because apparently new boyfriend is buying her a rabbit. 

I tried asking her if she thought that was a good idea, and she told me that I could go fuck myself for trying to make her feel bad. She’s apparently moving the new rabbit she’s getting today along with her current rabbit over to her new boyfriend’s apartment so she can take better care of them.

I guess I’m not really holding my breath. I wonder if new boyfriend cares enough about animals to make sure they aren’t going to die when she inevitably neglects them again. I wonder if someday she’ll get it through her head that no, she really was the reason the other one died, and that it wasn’t my fault. I wish I could make myself believe that it was entirely 100% not my fault, too, because I knew how lazy she was, and I should’ve checked on them sooner - even though it wasn’t and shouldn’t have been my responsibility at all.

I don’t really have a good, conclusive way to end this post, other than to say I’m really pissed off and hurt. I realize that I can (and do) some pretty stupid things for women when I’m in relationships, and these are things I’m working through with counselors - but seriously, fuck this shit.

1:08pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wHqAJEy
(Notes: 2)
  
March 9, 2012
Paid Hosting Service

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hosting I’ve been doing for the past five or six months, and I’d really like to expand it further. I take a lot of pride in what I do, but I see areas where things could improve, too.

  • Currently I’m hosting about two dozen blogs. I’d certainly like to be able to host more than that, but the current server package I pay for is starting to have some growing pains. Offering a paid service would let me upgrade the server, and would allow me to continue to host other blogs freely for those bloggers who would choose not to purchase hosting.
  • Moving to the new server package would give me the ability to offer new features that I can’t afford to do today, like cPanel to allow users to manage their site (if they wanted to) or Fantastico (if they wanted to install forums or host another blog, etc)
  • Seeing as I’d be doing a paid service, I’d be willing to expand it out further to stuff not strictly related to gaming/WoW. I’d still be caveating it with no illegal materials/file hosting, but otherwise, I’d be open to hosting a wider variety of sites, not even strictly limited to blogs, but could also host general websites, guild forums, etc. 
  • I’d be able to offer email service. Technically I can do that on my current servers (though few have asked), but it hasn’t been worth adding the extra load onto my server. 
  • I’d be able to do more stuff in an automated fashion, which would give me a faster response time. Setting up new blogs, subdomains, all that stuff would become a much faster process for me, allowing me to help less tech-savvy bloggers much, much easier.
  • I’d be able to properly use the Cloudflare CDN - more or less what this means is that images and similar files get scattered out to distributed “content servers” worldwide which allows a website to be served much faster than it normally would be if everything was kept on the single server - and more importantly, this is a completely invisible and pretty much pain-free process for both me AND any bloggers I’d host.

So I guess more or less, offering paid hosting lets me get more good things for everyone, and in theory hopefully means I could stop feeling bad about having to send out emails trying to solicit donations from the people I’m currently hosting. Currently I’ve covered approximately 80% of all the server costs since I started hosting websites about six months ago.

I’m not complaining about that - I can afford to do this, and if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be offering the service. However, offering a paid service would allow me to do even more than I am today, which is something I’m keenly interested in.

So here’s my thinking:

  • $40 a year or $4 per month (EDIT: Based on feedback, I’ve changed pricing from $20 year/$2 per month - apparently some people thought I was undervaluing my support)
  • Domain name is not included
  • 5GB of disk space
  • 50GB of bandwidth
  • Access to cPanel to configure FTP accounts, email accounts, subdomains, etc.
  • Unlimited FTP accounts, email accounts, MySQL Databases (though all count against disk space)
  • Same level of support I provide today - as much or as little help as you need to make your job as a blogger as simple as possible. I offer handling the transfer process from other hosts, plugin/theme/site software updating, backups, all that stuff, so you’re free to do what you want - blog and produce content.

Now, I realize that there are a plethora of corporate hosts who can offer more disk space, more bandwidth, etc. for roughly the same amount of money, or a slightly larger cost. Going with them, you’d also get the benefit of the fact that they’re obviously an already well established company, they have millions of users, etc. 

Why go with me then?

Well, the main reason I can think of as a selling point (which is admittedly also a weak point to some degree) is that if you have a problem, you know who’s going to be fixing it - i.e., me. I take pride in my work, and while I cannot put words in anyone’s mouths, I believe that my support provided to all of the bloggers and Mumble servers I currently host stands by this - I will bend over backwards and work late hours to ensure your site is online and functioning to the best degree I can possibly manage. 

I truly enjoy my day job as a business programmer, but one thing that it does not grant me is the feeling that I am truly helping people. Doing this service has given me that feeling - and you may scoff and say that I’m inflating my own ego because all I’m doing are hosting a bunch of gaming blogs and not solving world hunger or anything, but the point is that I am doing the best I can to make life easier for people so they can pay attention to what it is that they actually want to do, and for me, that feels good. When I see comments from my bloggers on Twitter praising how fast or helpful I am in solving their problems, it makes my day better. 

So I want feedback - please tweet me @Vitaemachina what you think about this - whether or not you think you’d use a service like this, if you think my pricing is too high/too low, or that I’m crazy for even trying to do this - tell me honestly.

If your thoughts veer towards the verbose, and Twitter’s not the proper vehicle for your vociferous support (or vacillating disinterest), you may also certainly email me at the usual address of jadissa AT vitaemachina DOT com. 

Either way, thanks for taking your time reading this!

4:15pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wHjiLfe
(Notes: 3)
  
March 2, 2012
Communication

I had a pretty bad night last night.

Sometimes this happens, and it seems to happen apropos of nothing - or at least, when I’m looking back on things, I can’t trace it to any sort of root cause. Sometimes a night just crosses over the event horizon, and there’s really no turning back. I can run through my list of reasons of why I should be happy, why I shouldn’t be feeling the way I am at that given moment, but it doesn’t change it all (or most of) the time.

Sometimes there’s really nothing more that can be done except to just let go and feel yourself tumble over the waterfall’s edge, hoping that you’re going to have the strength afterwards to push back up to the surface and break through, gasping to reclaim the air you spent screaming out on the way down.

I digress. 

Black moods like this one cause me to look at my life and my actions with more clarity - admittedly, a more critical clarity than is necessary, but a clarity nonetheless, borne out of wanting to overanalyze myself and explain why exactly I spend time doing things, especially when I’m very convinced (at that moment, anyway) that all the things I do are intrinsically awful and that the world would be much better off were I to just nip off and stop bothering everyone forever.

I had one of those moments last night when I realized that communication is one of the most important things in the world to me, and is a driving force behind most of what I do.

Sleepy Hams is a pretty obvious no-brainer - the entire project is based around providing voice chat and creating a safe place for people to be social. Facilitating a community, helping people make friends? All good things.

Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging - all forms of social media are really pretty obvious - they’re direct communication, but they’re all something I take very seriously. Twitter alone has opened up massive new amounts of people to communicate with.

I didn’t really understand why I was driving myself to host blogs and websites for people - it’s a fun hobby that I enjoy (most of the time), and the new tech skills have already paid off in my career - but over time, I’ve realized that what I really want more than anything is to free other people up as much as I can to just focus on writing, on communicating.

My day job is all about writing software that zips communications between companies around the world - which honestly sounds very boring to most anyone I try to explain it to, but is something I’m passionate about.

Writing? Sometimes it’s the only way to communicate my ideas. Sometimes it’s not the only way, but it’s the best way, because I can edit say exactly what I want.

Gaming? I enjoy gaming a lot, but quite honestly, I’ve grown to where playing games solo really isn’t something I enjoy. For me, I have to have a strong social factor which involves communication.

Even looking at many of the things that bother me in life, they spring from communication. An anxiety trigger that seems to come up a lot these days is not getting responses to things - emails primarily, but other things too. It makes me feel a pretty horrid bundle of assorted feelings. Did I offend the other person? Did I say something stupid? Does the other person just feel like I’m not worth responding to?

Well, that last part is really just sort of the normal anxiety train of thought I have in my head, wondering how I have (or am, or will) fucked up at any given point in time.

Communication, though. It sounds like sort of a silly motivation to do things when you put it on paper (or screen, as it were). I wonder how many people share this as their motivation, and how many of them suffer from depression and anxiety. How many others are just trying to reach out in whatever fashion they can to communicate, to figure out why they can’t just think normally, why other people can do things so much easier? How many of those people create methods and means of communication, methods that they control to some degree, all as a form of fighting off their own inner demons of anxiety?

Viewed with that lens, my projects are only a partial success, because I’m not even making use of them. I don’t spend much time in public Sleepy Hams channels because anxiety. I don’t have a blog on my own servers anymore because I didn’t feel like I had anything important to contribute.

I guess I don’t feel bad about the blog, because my perspective on WoW’s changed so much over the past two years that it’d be pretty tough to write something and six months later still believe it. There’s other people out there who write more, who write better, and I’m quite honestly pleased to be associated with them even if only tangentially as their web host.

Sleepy Hams is something that I need to change, though. Registrations have slowed and server traffic is down, which (while somewhat disappointing) means that the community that does use it is slowly growing more solid, and keeping myself out of it isn’t doing me any good. I need to get over the notion that people flat-out don’t want me around in their conversations, and just go participate.

I can’t help but feel this post changed direction a few times, and tone too, but I guess that’s sort of inevitable as I am trying to avoid editing the things I write. Ah well. 

9:33am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wHL6cRB
February 25, 2012

Anonymous asked: Celebrity crush?

I thought Olivia Wilde did an awesome job on House, though I haven’t seen her in much else. She’s mostly a “purely physical” though, I haven’t read much about her as a person.

Natalie Portman’s an easy choice - smart, worldly, a genuinely good person combined with awesome acting skills (plus attractive)! Ellen Page is awesome as well - cute, and I’ve liked anything I’ve seen her in since I saw her kick major ass in Hard Candy. 

Also, I’ve had a longstanding crush on a few male actors - Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr, and Brad Pitt. Depp’s starting to wear a bit thin, though.

2:36pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wH0sjzh
February 24, 2012

Anonymous asked: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live & why?

It’s not a real place, unfortunately - “somewhere within an hour’s radius of all of my friends” doesn’t exist. I’ve got friends all over the place - even more since I got into Twitter and blogging - but it definitely is tough to see most of the people I’m friends with.

If I had to pick a physical location, I’d probably go with somewhere like Iceland or one of the Scandanavian countries. I’m pretty okay with the climate, and I think I have ideas that are much more in common with people in Europe than in America, unfortunately. Plus, ethnically I’m a Euro-mutt with some Native American on the side, but my largest ethnicity I’m aware of is Norwegian.

8:59am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wGy9EhL
February 24, 2012

Anonymous asked: Favorite comfort food?

Cheeseburgers, hands down. Double cheeseburger, extra cheese, lightly toasted bun, a few pickles, ketchup and mustard. DONE.

Honestly, though, any fast food fills this niche for me, and admittedly I live a horrible culinary hedonistic lifestyle where I subsist on lots of burgers, Subway, and pizza. I’m slowly trying to change my diet to stop this, because it’s not exactly healthy for the longterm.

8:56am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wGy8ume
February 24, 2012

Anonymous asked: Country or City? Chocolate or Vanilla? Bath or Shower? White or Black? Tall or Short? Plains or Mountains? Fairies or Dragons?

  • City close to the outskirts so I could duck into the country easily.
  • Chocolate. I am a slave for dark chocolate.
  • Showers. I really like moving water.
  • Black. I look a lot better in black than I do in white!
  • Indifferent, but slanting towards tall.
  • Mountains. I love the scenery in Colorado for this reason. I wish I could visit there again.
  • Dragons. I’ve never been much on the fae.

8:50am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtRS5wGy8EDm
Liked posts on Tumblr: More liked posts »