Tuesday, September 15, 2015

LENS and Life, week of 9/8

This is horribly belated.   I missed a couple weeks of LENS and Life, because I've been in a funk for the last couple weeks (unrelated to LENS).  In brief: (1) my job is really getting to me, (2) I accidentally overturned an entire shelf onto my foot, and (3) a computer game has been eating my social life.  In order of mention...

(1) I will not be at my job this time next year.  It's hurting my sanity and I think it's mostly outlived its usefulness in terms of educating me in ABA and autism.  I don't love the work, and it's not what I want to do with my life anyway.  I don't anticipate cheering about this decision from anyone except my doctor (she sees life very differently than other people), but it's mine to make.  My boy is okay with supporting both of us in the future, when I finally leave, and I intend to start attending events in the community.  Getting myself and my name out there, trying to help or direct people who need the direction. 

(2) The Shelf Incident.  So I keep a fan near my window and the window AC that's the room's only source of cooling.  I have to switch the fan between window and AC, which unfortunately involves moving a lot of stuff around.  This stuff includes several plastic crates full of miscellaneous etc, and a 25 pound weight.  So while I was doing that at 1 in the morning a couple Fridays ago, everything unbalanced just the wrong way and the crates and weight fell right off the shelf.  Naturally, gravity took its course and they fell at and on top of my feet.  Something- I'm not sure what- found the top of my foot, and the 25 pound weight followed after.  I yanked my foot away pretty fast, but whatever it was left me a nice deep puncture in the top of my foot.  Fortunately not a large puncture, but it was definitely bleeding. 

I did what most groggy first aid unsavvy people would do, which was to clean the stab site out, slap a bandaid on it, flex the entire foot to see if I had any broken bones (nope), and then go back to sleep.  I woke up about an hour later to the feeling of blood trickling down my foot, and a small puddle on my sheet.  I'd never seen an injury refuse to clot like that, so I woke up a bit more this time and slapped gauze over it, taped the gauze down with medical tape, bleached the sheets, and went back to bed.  I woke up the next morning to find it was still trying to bleed every time I moved.  Which is how I ended up wearing gauze and medical tape every day for a week and a half.  It stopped periodically bleeding after a couple of days, but refused to stop oozing plasma until I lost patience with keeping gauze on it and let the air dry it out. 

Which gets us pretty close to now, one day after I took a walk with my boy.  It feels like the internal injury bit of the puncture is mostly healed.  I've stayed off the foot as much as possible, but I don't want to get too out of shape.  At this point the internal bits pull slightly when I walk full stride, but don't hurt.  I'm able to wear my running shoes without pain.  So it's probably safe to say things are going to be okay.  I still want to get back to jogging, because that was good exercise and I need the exercise, but I'll be content with taking 2+ km walks for now. 

(3) World of Warcraft is a terrible thing for people with addictive personalities and less self-control than they would like.  It's an immense game, with an immense number of things to do.  Unfortunately, a lot of its players are not nice people.  To give you an idea of how many things there are to do...  Did you ever collect bottle caps, or stamps, or trading cards?  Great!  In WoW, you can collect mounts (like horses, dragons, gryphons, etc).  You can also collect toys, or special items you can use for an amusing but harmless effect ingame.  There are toys that let you blow bubbles ingame, toys that let you turn into other creatures, toys that summon a comfy chair or a board game.  And you can collect achievements, which are basically proof that you did a thing.  You can get achievements for completing a dungeon, collecting this or that hard-to-find toy or mount, or making your way through the entire story of an area.  

There are dozens of unique areas in the game, and you progress through them as you progress in the game on a character.  Each area has at least hundred quests, often much more, and while you don't need to do every quest in every area, there's a set of achievements for doing so across the world.  See how this all starts linking together?  You get achievements for collecting, for doing quests, for doing special areas called dungeons... 

The game is built on the concept of its players never, ever running out of things to do, and unfortunately, it succeeds.  I suspect the only group of people it doesn't succeed in keeping occupied are the ones who've played since the game began, and so were able to keep up with the absurd amount of content they've spooled out over the past 10 years.  Newer players, like myself?  Have no chance of ever catching up. 

The tagline I've given WoW is "just one more thing."  That's because when you play, you know you can stop playing at any time, but ooh maybe you should spend a few minutes trying to get this one thing.  It won't take long, and it looks really cool.  And once you finish that, you're notice from the information on the screen that there's an event going on right now, and maybe you should go do that since it's not always here, and when you've finish that you get distracted by a friend ingame wanting to do this or that together... and by the time you look up it's past your bedtime and you have work in the morning. 

I suspect, if I weren't under so much stress and frustration with life and politics and everything, I wouldn't be so susceptible to the "just one more thing" syndrome WoW manipulates you into.  But unfortunately, that's my life right now.  It took me awhile, but about a month ago I canceled my subscription.  It's a monthly subscription, so it took until yesterday to run out.  Hopefully this will mean more time to spend on my blog, with my friends, and on life in general. 

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