|
Daikatana Syndrome
The question on the journal list today is "If your life were a movie, what movie would it be?"
This is exactly the sort of fluffy question everyone likes to answer - and answers galore have been arriving in my mailbox. That's not the problem; I like mail. The problem is the question also happens to be one which makes me grind my teeth.
Listen:
My life is not like any movie. Furthermore, if someone made a movie which was like my life, they wouldn't be able to sell the script. Movies are meant to be entertaining, and most of us lead lives which are boring.
I'm not trying to insult anyone when I say that. Your life is probably pretty interesting to you, and those close to you, but it's not interesting to Joe in Weehawken, who can match you experience for experience.
Name the unusual or unexpected or nasty things that happened to you this week. Found a twenty on the sidewalk? Someone backed into your car? Had a fight with your lover? Hundreds of thousands of other people had exactly the same experiences this week. It's not novel, and it's not especially interesting to watch.
I have been meaning to write a real entry ("Absent Friends" was canned - written elsewhere and then pasted in) for days now. It hasn't been a lack of time (although I haven't had much). No, I'm suffering from a sort of Daikatana Syndrome.
I shall explain.
Daikatana Syndrome could as easily be Last Dangerous Visions Syndrome, but we'll cut Ellison a break. Daikatana is a long-awaited, long-overdue video game. Some of us suspect the reason it's so long overdue is that John Romero has been talking for so long about how great it is that he's trapped by the expectations he himself has fostered.
Six months go by and the game is almost done - but meanwhile a new game has come out which is winning all sorts of awards. It has to be better than that. Back to the shop. Six more months go by and the game is looking good - but then a new video technology appears, and some games which use it for amazing new graphics innovations. Nope, has to be able to incorporate that. Back to the shop.
The game will never be as good as Romero has said it will be, but he doesn't have the heart to release it and take his licks and start something new. At least, that's my theory.
I have the opposite problem. I get ready to write about something here, and I can't for a couple of days because of lack of time - and by the time I get to it, it doesn't seem important anymore. The situation has changed completely by then.
Ten days ago - that is, Tuesday before last - I had a really good day. I got up, made myself reasonably pretty. I went downtown to the not-quite-a-salon and got my legs waxed. I had a lovely lunch in a Newbury St cafe, a nice glass of white wine and a very non-traditional salad Nicoise. Walked down the street, got a cup of coffee for a leisurely walk across the river. Attended two meetings which actually turned out to be useful, left work, bought some computer games, and went home.
A beautiful day. Notice that no work was actually done (meetings don't count; they are the opposite of work - the most non-productive way to spend one's time in an office environment). Furthermore, no work was done and I had arranged things so as to not feel guilty about it. The waxing appointment plus the meetings enabled me to "legally" write off my entire day.
A high point. I wanted to write about it to prove that I'm not always cranky. But I didn't - because at the time I was taking a break from the journal and didn't want to start again yet. By the time I was ready to come back, it was a week later and everything had changed.
This past Tuesday was absolutely horrid.
I was already very displeased with the amount of progress I was making on the code, since I had stopped on the weekend to pull a lot of my work out, revamp the database design to something I felt made more sense, and start some things over. Then on Monday, fatigued from working on the code (and stressing about the code), I stayed home and worked a limited amount from there. Unknown to me, my project manager was trying to find me all day Monday to gripe about the big changes I'd made.
So on Tuesday I had a very fierce argument with him, where I told him (not quite in these words), "Sod off, you're not my boss, and I don't have to tell you my exact movements at all times" and he told me (not quite in these words), "This isn't your dictatorship, and if you make a change of that scale again without getting approval from the rest of us first, I'll raise a stink from here to Rhode Island." And I had to tear many of my changes out a second time, setting me further back, which he insists is my own damned fault.
Oh, it has a reasonably happy ending. We both are overanxious about this project, we both needed to vent, and we shook hands and made up and have had no friction since. But you see I couldn't very well write about that as my first entry - too cranky. You'd think it was back to business as usual.
It bothered me more than I was initially willing to admit that some of you think I'm cranky all the time. Among the many, many things I don't like people perceiving me as, "grouch" is right at the top of the list.
Some of it was nagging awareness: While these journal entries are always going to represent the most grumpy side of my personality (that's how I get rid of it), I have to admit that recent weeks have been worse than usual. And that admission makes me even grumpier.
See, my life is supposed to be (and normally is) almost completely stress-free. That's the rule. I've managed it for years. So if I have stress, real stress, it's a warning sign that something is wrong with my life. I don't like that. Normally, aside from the usual matters of gender and fiction sales, my life is bliss.
Anyway, I obviously needed to go away until things improved and I could write something here that wasn't all full of crankiness and introspection. ("Over-analyzes everything" also annoys me.)
Well, things aren't going to improve. The only improvement is that I've settled into this state where I know that being overworked and stressed is temporarily the norm, relieving some of the meta-angst. But that is so unlike me, and I hate it. I wouldn't normally knock myself out for anything work-related. And the only reason I'm doing it now is guilt. I've made a lot of promises about this code, and I have a standard to meet.
I hope it doesn't turn out to be Daikatana Syndrome in disguise.
Meanwhile, going back to the beginning of this entry, my life is not a movie and it's even less fascinating than usual now ... which leaves me up a tree.
If I write here, it will probably be grousing about the mundane, or grousing about the usual sad subjects which you're tired of hearing about (like writing, which has been looming especially large in my head lately).
If I don't write here, I get itchy without a place to talk about all the little memory notes I want to make, like Mary Anne's visit and the Eddie Izzard show. And I don't get to vent about some of those things that I always vent about - and if I don't vent, I really do get grouchy all the time.
I can't win. If this were truly a journal, if it were private, I could just keep returning to the same themes again and again. But it isn't, and there are various reasons why I don't want it to be. I like knowing that people read this - but having an audience implies obligations I'm not sure I can meet at present. I feel like I always need to come up with something different and interesting to say - and I don't keep a journal for that. I write fiction for that.
Sometimes I've thought about just writing a fictional journal - much simpler - but then there would be a lot of people in this community who'd refuse to read it because it wasn't "real."
These are probably the same people who want movies to be more like everyday existence.
© Columbine
|
|
