Solitaire
by Scott Hardie on September 7, 2009
Right now, I don't think I could write emotionally about my feelings from last night as well as I could have in the moment, but I haven't finished considering them and this is a part of that process. Long story short, I found myself passing on friends who really wanted to spend time with me in order to sit here and write code for Celebrity Goo Game, and I came to question what the hell I was doing. As in, my whole lifestyle.
I grew up an only child, spending vast amounts of time alone on my projects. As an adult, seeing friends once a week is enough for me. But it's not for Kelly. She has to see people daily or she goes a little crazy, the same way I get if I don't have some downtime by myself. We spend a lot of time together, but that doesn't take the place of friendships. Since she moved here a year and a half ago, we've made efforts to find new friends we can visit with any time, since our existing friends were unable to see us often because they worked too much or lived too far away. That's what led us to meetup.com, which led us to a gaming group on Monday nights, which led to Gothic Earth. Because of that, the tables have turned, and now we have friends who want to see us all the time, and I'm the one "too busy" to visit with them. I just wanted Kelly not to feel so lonely all the time, but if I leave the noisy living room to go back to whatever project I was working on, it feels wrong. I feel like I'm saying that lines of code are more important to me than they are, and that's not true. I feel like a lousy friend, squandering human relationships so I can spend more time on a hobby.
Part of the problem is that this particular project just isn't as interesting as I expected it to be. If I was really fired up and passionate about it, then it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to question my behavior. But I find myself slogging through more lame code that bores me, and I find myself asking, what's the point? I have some fun creating certain individual goos once in a while, but the last time the goo game was really fun for me was when we played it live at GooCon, 11 months ago. Mostly I go through the motions of cranking out another batch of goos every couple of weeks because other people seem to like it so much. The reason that Rock Block and Gothic Earth get so much more attention from me is that they're way more fun to work on. For a few minutes last night, I just stared at the code, wondering if 40 rounds was a good milestone to stop at. The game has to stop someday, right? These were not happy thoughts at a time when I was already down on myself.
Rather than writing another line, I got in the car with Kelly and drove across town to find the friends we'd sent away. One had gone to work for the night, but we found the other asleep in his apartment. He jumped at the chance to go out for a while, not bothered at being woken up or at being turned away earlier in the evening. We spent a few hours at Steak 'n' Shake just talking and laughing. I don't think the cheese fries helped my waistline or the 3am bedtime helped my sleep routine, but it still felt like the healthiest thing I had done in a long time.
So now I'm left to wonder what's next. I knew when I started Gothic Earth that I didn't have enough time in my schedule to keep doing it and everything else, and now I need to free up room in my schedule for hanging out with friends, too. Does that mean that I need to give up some projects to save time? The goo game might not be as much fun for me as certain other interests, but it is still fun, and it has survived this long because it usually requires very little time from me. (This particular coding project is related to the upcoming round, and I'll be out of town the next two Saturdays, so this was my chance to get it done.) It wouldn't make sense to end the goo game or any other projects that rank low in my interests these days, because I would save very little time by doing so. I think the right answer is to plan less, to stop making up my mind before the weekend that this project will get done, and to do what I wind up having time for. I don't have to give up any projects; I just have to accept that some are going to happen more slowly. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," sang a man from Liverpool, and it's time I started living it.
Two Replies to Solitaire
Lori Lancaster | September 8, 2009
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The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
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Jackie Mason | September 8, 2009
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