Woo! Party!
Not really but I did get my work-in-progress chapter finished and I’m almost done with the next one in the queue. Two chapters in a week – that’s the pace I’d like to keep with but it’s unrealistic with school in the mix. Still, I’m pleased that I got as much done as I have. There’s a certain amount of overhead to leaving the project for weeks at a time and trying to come back halfway through…
By next week I should have nine chapters done. That’s out of thirty total. In general, this novel is definitely stronger than previous manuscripts I’ve collected together. I still have some concerns about the voice but I tell myself that gets polished in editing. Maybe it will.
With all my new found free time I also managed to play some Team Fortress 2. It occurred to me that I have not played a multiplayer game is over a year. Stream showed my last login sometime during 2009.
I’m not surprised. It’s just not worth bothering to log in and find a room when I know I’ll be bumped out with other things twenty minutes later. More likely, I would overplay and find myself mysteriously out of a few hours of desperately needed sleep. I’m even kicking myself now – last night I burned through with only five or so hours of shuteye – but if I had done that on a school night I’d be running on three days of empty. Not plausible.
It’s all somewhat depressing. I grew up on video games. They’re as integral to my daily bread as morning cartoons and evening news. Hell, I was playing Team Fortress 2 back in college when I had all the free time in the world – at least I think I did. It’s also occurred to me that I don’t have a strong recollection of how much free time I actually had. What did I even do with myself before class and Creekside? Why did not I finish like fifteen novels a year? What a god-damn slacker 2009 me was.
The hope is that I can finagle myself through the next year and come out with an MBA, a better sense of managing my time, and a ticket to self-employment tacked on for good measure. I have this oblique expectation that self-employment will somehow mean more time. In reality, I have to suspect it’ll be even more work than a proper job. Hell, it already nearly is. The only difference is that there’s less overhead – it’s not called bullshit when it’s your company. Also, there’s that nice correlation between effort and work.
Allow me to propose a theory.
Humans, by nature, expect that a given effort will result, consistently, in a given reward. For example, the person who gathers more berries has more berries to eat. This is a direct correlation.
The modern employee is deceived into misery through the subversion of this system. One TPS report, or thirty – the paycheck still comes every two week and at the same amount. Even further, the pay is a meaningless digital construct that does little to inspire increased effort. There are just too many steps between the effort performed and the need being fulfilled to make an emotion bond. In this vein, I have to wonder what would happen if people were only paid in cash, or in food.
The addendum to this is video games. There are plenty reasons to enjoy running around hitting things with a sword, but at a psychological level games restore the correlation between effort and reward. Kill the goblin, take its gold. Explore the world, gain a rank. Shoot the people, get a higher score. The effort is digital and the reward is too. Both the labor and reward and linked by type and degree. This is psychologically pleasing.
A further expansion of this idea, and the full circle of this posting, is that writing is similarly balanced. When I write more, I have more written. When I write enough, I have the story done. There is no subversion of effort. This is the best I can figure for how I can spent seven hours sitting a desk writing and find this pleasant, while spending seven hours at a desk doing ‘work’ and find it horrifyingly disagreeable.
And so my expectation is less that I will somehow have all this wonderful time once I graduate – but that I can restore the link between doing things and receiving the expected compensation for doing so. The sad part is that school is actually quite fulfilling – do the work, get the grade. Then again, this has been like the best spring break ever. I quite possibly just like being on vacation. There’s always that.
In conclusion, I’ve been passing my time at working listening to the Stereo Mood Chillout Station. Enjoy!
