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Current Tunes: Down - Never Try

To call it a hiatus would be a misnomer, now wouldn’t it? It’s been a tad more than seven months since I put anything up here. That’s far too long. I hope you missed me of course. How silly is that to say? Of course I hope you missed me, everyone wants to be missed.

I stayed away for so long because I’m an incomplete human being, and I get overwhelmed sometimes. It’s not to say I haven’t been busy, because I have. In the time since we last met, I’ve been working a steady job, moved to a new apartment, and have completely finished my thesis, receiving my master’s degree in the process. That was a long process, to say the least. A two year commitment has finally come full circle. I’m the first person on my mom’s side of the family to ever receive a graduate degree of any kind. A personal point of pride, right?

I’m glad to be back doing this. I want to take a moment and personally thank everyone who told that they missed reading my blog posts, or poked and prodded me to get back to posting. That’s precisely what I needed to get Quantifiable Darkness up and running again: encouragement. So thank you for that.

There’s not much in the way of specific material I want to cover here at the start, but I will say a few words about what’s been on my mind the past week or so: football.

This is my favorite time of the year, no doubt about it. Every weekend there are 100 different little battles to witness, teams scrambling their way to the top, hoping for a shot at eternal gridiron glory. In football season, the weekend transforms. In other seasons the weekend is just an escape from work, but in football season the weekend becomes a thing to cherish. In football season, the weekend becomes so much shorter though; time just disappears.

That’s the dangerous part of this time of year for me…

With school done and the weight of that off my shoulders, the proper thing for me to do is use this time wisely to work on major projects. My thesis is completed, but that thesis is just the start of a book. I have so much more to do to complete that book. I have other projects I want to start on too, which includes doing some short story collections and fleshing out a sci-fi novel. Blogging on here regularly as well. Not to mention the brutally painful process of trying to find a legitimate, salaried job. There's a lot on my plate.

I can’t exhaust too much time on weekends just slopping down in front of the TV for hours on end watching football. It’ll be a tough trend to break; it’s something I’ve done for years on end. And I love doing it. But I have to remember there are more important things than football. There's a fairly simple way to combat my habit of engrossing myself in football all weekend. Usually on Sunday evenings, after the second round of NFL games get done, it begins to dawn on me that the evening is coming to a close. I almost always get this sick feeling in my stomach right around then. It's a tidal wave of guilt and shame that folds over on top of me as I realize I spent a whole day doing nothing productive. If I'm going to get things done, if I'm going to avoid wasting all my free hours on football, I think all I have to do is remember that god-awful feeling. I have to remind myself that to avoid that feeling, I have to regulate my football time and put forth a heartfelt effort to produce and create.

I have a secret love for large projects. I say it's secret because it doesn't always show through in how I act, but it really is there. I can let myself become quite engrossed in something when I want to be. This affection for real, creative involvement in something somehow gets easily overridden by other activities, and that is something I am going to work on as a person. Blogging here regularly (Monday, Wednesday, & Friday) will work towards that goal.