Ah! It appears, lost in contemplation and the hustle and bustle of the modern day, I missed my window to hit five hundred posts in 2024. So it goes. Perhaps it is just and meet that 2025 gets the rights to five hundred. Fives go with fives, mathematically. Fives like a five.
Been playing tons of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII; Reunion or however it is most proper to arrange that title. It's a real good story, real fun game. Lots of game in the crannies of it, where Final Fantasy does best, at least to me. I am such a sucker for all of their systems, though. I go hog wild, screw around in menus for hours and hours, tweaking and rebuilding everything they let me tinker with.
*
The difficulty of finding the place between taking pride in your work and working too hard--to stay steady, excelling whenever possible, without burning out or making a tool of yourself--has always borne down hard on me in my professional life and other endeavors. All endeavors, I guess, except school, the one area in which I am gifted in the opposite sense entirely. There, I can see so clearly that pride is a false virtue, everything in front of my eyes and at my hands is total fucking bullshit, and the obvious and correct thing to do is to coast on my personal qualities in the service of doing the absolute bare minimum while devoting all my proper energies to my own ends.
Even here, athletics and music proved a weak spot. I don't especially seek out intrinsically social endeavors, but when present, I abhor not pulling my weight, and dread underperforming or quitting out. However resentfully, I am wired to put in an honest effort, because I'm not made to say that kind of fuck you to people who are engaged in something they care deeply about. I can even make myself care. Lo and behold, sometimes this praxis finds me actually caring deeply. It can become a problem, as eventually, I can care more than is strictly required or even wise. I can care so much that I quit, which, y'know. I could have saved myself a lot of time, there. But again, I am wired to earn quitting in many cases. Not all! Thank the lord. But enough.
Yet what price personal growth?
It could probably be worked out, actually, and winced at.
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Real life is some fucked up shit, man. Never stops coming at you. People get covid, motherfuckers have a plan to denaturalize and deport you, other motherfuckers want to make every house in America a lethal-force compound, so like, maybe that's ok?
Guess I'll just keep going to work and like, doing laundry and playing games and shit. Hang out with my cats. Dunno what the fuck else I'm supposed to do.
--JL
