Angel’s Weblog

It’s not much, but I added a bit:

Austin: Volume 1 con’t

Oh, one more thing: I finally reached a meditative state today. It was very cool and fun. It feels like your body goes to sleep but your mind is still awake. It was lots of fun. 🙂

I feel like such a New Age nutter though, doing all these things. The next thing you know, I’ll be wearing crystals and talking about when the Angels in UFOs are coming down to take us all back to our original planet.

*sigh* I wonder when I’ll get past my psychological hang-ups. Growing up with hard-core engineers and atheists does have its problems. Sure, I wasn’t indoctrinated into a single religion, but I was indoctrinated outside of all spirituality.

Kisses to my mom though. Sure, she’s one wacky atheist, but I totally adore her. And just like religion has things to teach us, atheism does as well.

I thought the baby would keep me off the ‘crack, but, as yesterday proved, I have no problem playing during the day while she is sleeping or playing by herself. I investigated crafting all day yesterday and left all my work undone.

No, what keeps me off the ‘crack is Matt. It’s no fun to play without Matt. So I have to wait until he comes home, and then we wait for the munchkin to go to sleep. She goes to bed between 8p and 9p, and then we get about an hour of online play before it’s our bedtime.

We won’t be getting a fix this weekend though because we are going to visit my Dad in Conroe.

Shelly called me last night to tell me that her family recently purchased Guild Wars, which is a game in the same genre as Everquest (MMORPG) but there are no online fees. Everquest cost Matt and I $30 ($15 each) each month to maintain our subscriptions. Shelly wants Matt and I to get Guild Wars, and, though it sounds like a lot of fun to play games with Shelly’s family across cities (that would ROCK), we decided against it because they will be leveling a lot faster than us, and, in the end, we won’t get to play with them because people of disparate levels can’t group together. That’s really a bummer though. It would have been so much fun playing with the Clarks.

It sounds like they have been bitten by the MMORPG bug in a bad way though. I talked to Shelly about 7p last night, and she had been working all day since 4am. So I asked, “You’re going straight to bed then?” She said, “No! I want to play my game!”

Heh heh, it’s a nasty bug to get. Lots of fun, but a real time sink.

Everquest is calling me. If you’re very quiet, you can hear it. “Log in, Angel. The baby’s asleep. You can craft your Apprentice III spells. So what if the breakfast dishes aren’t clean yet. So what if the house is messy and the laundry isn’t done. Come to me, Angel. I am your new lover.”

Boy, it doesn’t take long to get strung out on the dope again, does it?

So Matt has got a couple of new games recently, and I’ve been wanting a game. The only one that looked remotely interesting was the Vampire game. But my heart truly lies with Everquest. So, we activated our accounts again on Friday, and we’ve been playing EQ2 this weekend during the baby’s naps.

And it’s so much fun. 🙂 I wonder what it is about that game that I like so much? I think I enjoy it even more because Matt and I can play together. When we first got EQ2, I found it unenjoyable and tedious, and so did Matt. I asked Matt why we enjoyed it now when we didn’t when we first got it. He said he thinks it’s because we knew the first EQ inside and out, and EQ2 is very different. We weren’t approaching it as a new game, but as an extension of the old one. I agree with this. I would get really frustrated because I was an excellent healer in EQ but was a crap healer in EQ2 because the strategy is different.

I also think it was because we were in the mindset of just getting through the lower levels as quickly as possible to play the high-end game. We had played the low levels many times in EQ, so, whenever we made new characters, we knew exactly which zones would level us really fast. And when we got EQ2, we entered the game with that mindset: get through the low levels as fast as possible to get to the high-end game. But the game didn’t work like that, and, once again, I was getting frustrated. And it quickly became tedious just fighting mobs to level.

When we logged on this time… well, now we have a baby and everything is on her schedule. So we knew that we would have to quit playing at a moment’s notice when she woke up. So we didn’t go in with the mindset of just trying to level quickly. We went in with the mindset of exploring and questing — taking it a lot slower and having fun. Also, since it’s been so long since we played EQ, we didn’t try playing our old strategies. We just learned how to play our new characters. We’ve died a few times figuring out the strategies, but it was fun this time, not frustrating.

So I have a game again. It’s so nice. It’s an escape. I turn my mind off for an hour or so while the baby is sleeping and explore an online world.

Well, surfing on Otherkin and reading prezzey‘s entries on her own SF writing has put me in a writing mood. This is what little I wrote today. Its title:

Austin: Volume 1

The baby is sleeping, the husband is off at work… the house is quiet. It’s very nice. Especially since it’s an overcast day. Hurricane Emily is going through Mexico right now, and she brought cloud cover to central Texas. It makes it a nice, quiet, introspective day.

I’ve been surfing sites on Otherkin. Matt says these folks have psychological issues and that they aren’t actually the souls of other beings in human bodies. But, he says, if they are happy believing what they believe, then more power to them.

I am agnostic towards Otherkin. There are too many strange things in this world to perfunctorily dismiss their beliefs. Perhaps it is a psychological disorder, perhaps it’s something else. Either way, it would be an interesting study.

For me, Otherkin get my imagination stirring. Stories of elves, faeries, and vampires living on Earth, going to work, paying taxes, doing magickal work on a full moon night. That’s a great background for a story.

Shelrie emailed me out-of-the-blue. For those who don’t know, Shelrie and I met when we were 15-years-old in tenth grade in high school. We were best friends and went to University of Texas at Austin together. But, for various reasons, we had a falling out. We haven’t talked to each other in five years, and we weren’t really close for five years before that.

But I still care for her, even though we went our separate ways, and always remembered her fondly. And then she emailed. It was really nice to hear from her. It’s funny how friends are like the tide, quietly flowing in and out of one’s life.

I’ve been leaning more and more toward a vegetarian diet, and I finally made the complete switch yesterday. Before I became pregnant with Lily, Matt and I were eating less and less meat, but when I became pregnant, I started craving meat like a fiend, especially beef. But, since Lily has been born, meat has become less appealing with each passing day. So I finally just cut it out. If I get pregnant again, we’ll see if I start eating meat again.

It’s been so long since we’ve had an overcast day. Texas in the summer is a continuos string of hot, sunny days. A gray, rainy day is such a pleasant break. But we’re not getting much rain with the clouds. A gray day full of thunderstorms and lightning would be great!

Prezzey’s meme

So Matt was reading my journal, and, regarding the last entry saying that I failed every day, he said, “That’s so sad.” And then Kelsey commented in the entry before that she did not view me as mediocre at all.

Those two comments together got me thinking: maybe I’m too harsh on myself. It’s funny how we can see the beauty in others so clearly but we view ourselves through a muddy mirror. I knew a woman when I was in college who was overly thin and she still truly thought she was fat even though she was actually underweight.

Why can we not see ourselves clearly?

An anime that I really enjoyed was Evangelion. I don’t usually enjoy nihilistic, dark anime, but this one had several ideas in it that I liked. One of the ideas that it presented that I had never thought of before was the idea that there exists a whole bunch of versions of ourselves. There is the perception of Angel that is in Matt’s mind. There is the perception of Angel in my daughter’s mind. There is the perception of Angel in Kelsey’s mind. Each one of these Angels is slightly different from the other.

And there is the perception of Angel in Angel’s mind. All these Angels exist in this world.

I don’t mean to get so down on myself. I think I’m going through some cognitive dissonance right now. I’m not a loser, and yet I’m overweight, my house is dirty, and I haven’t written a best-selling novel. And all this time I thought overweight, dirty house, unfinished projects = loser.

I’ve always told the children in the family how wonderful they are — that their worth and beauty is not based on their weight or their public accomplishments, and I truly believed what I said. I see the kids, and they are so wonderful and fabulous and I love being around them. But I never believed these truths for myself.

I guess I need to start believing in myself. Thirty-seven years old and just now deciding to believe in myself. It’s hard to change though. Habits and repetitive thoughts take awhile to change. But I’ve thrown out many destructive monologues before that I had playing in my head; I’m sure I can throw this one out too.

Every day I try, and every day I fail. But the day will come when I will not fail.