Reverting to a Childlike State
Even before I had a child, I planned ahead; purchasing several old cartoons that I liked as a kid on DVD so that my future children could enjoy what I had enjoyed. I didn't want my kids to be stuck watching all the crap on TV nowadays; all those copy and paste kids shows.
I should probably explain that last part. You know those kids stories that go something like, "Turtle is looking for his Mommy. He found a lion. "Are you my Mommy?" "No, I'm a lion." *Turn page* Turtle is looking for his Mommy. He found a zebra. "Are you my Mommy?" "No, I'm a zebra." *Turn page* Turtle is... -- you get the idea. I HATE those types of kids stories. Not to mention the boring stuff like Dora or Super Why that sticks to a set structure and then leaves huge gaps for the kid to interact.
"Do you see something?"
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"Where?"
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"Behind me?"
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KILL ME NOW AND PUT ME OUT OF THIS MISERY!!
Suffice it to say, when Emerson was born I began hatching plans to gently coerce her into having better tastes than that. But somewhere in the haze of Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, and Ninja Turtles DVDs, Thomas the Tank Engine snuck in as stealthily as a train engine possibly could.
Strangely enough it was from a tube of toothpaste we bought for her, but when she started talking about Thomas I figured I might as well encourage it. I never watched it when I was a kid, but I knew it was old so it probably didn't suck as much as the stuff made in the last decade. So I bought her a set of Thomas DVDs, and the downward spiral began.
We watch Thomas every single night before bed now. We have Thomas books galore, and for Christmas we bought her a train table, a bunch of train tracks, and some Thomas toys. But in all of this hub-bub surrounding her love for all things Thomas, this is the dirty-little secret I've yet to share publicly: I kind of like the show as well.
Look, all parents have to act like a kid sometimes; it's just the natural way of things. I have to know the names of every single train on that show so that when my daughter asks me about one I can tell her who it is and when I'm in the store looking to buy her a new toy I know which ones she likes. The thing is, last night we were watching an episode in which Sir Topham Hatt (The head conductor for the island of Sodor (where all of the trains live (duh))) had a statue made of all of the main train engines, and I noticed that one of them was missing. I actually paused the show and took it frame-by-frame to make sure that he really wasn't in there. I debated whether or not a generic mass at the end of the statue was actually the missing engine with my nearly three-year old daughter.
Yes, I found a flaw in a children's television show and I analyzed the situation to make sure I was right. That's probably taking it a step to far, but here's the thing: I love snuggling up with my daughter every night and watching our show. Besides, what fun would have a child be if you didn't revert back to your own childlike state? None at all.
Why? Because. Why? Because.
"What said hee-haw?"
"Huh? Donkeys say that. Where'd you hear a donkey?"
"On the TV. Why do they say hee-haw?"
"Just because that's the noise they make."
"Whyyyyyyy?"
"That's just the noise that they make. Like pigs say oink oink."
"Why?"
"They just do."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Whyyyyy?"
You know, sometimes those jokes you hear all the time are completely true. My daughter has definitely reached the "Why? Phase", and it's driving me crazy. This is the battle line. The choices I make now will help decide whether or not I was a good parent. Will I try my best to give accurate answers, or just tell her to stop talking and turn the volume up on the TV?
Actually, it's kind of somewhere in the middle. Look, I'm not a genius. I have my limits, and she really likes to test them. Sometimes I find myself trying to explain things that I'm really not sure I entirely understand myself. One of my favorite podcasts, Stop Podcasting Yourself, has an overheard segment where people call in with whatever ridiculous/hilarious/stupefying things they've heard. I'm reminded of one that went something like this:
"Dad, how do fireworks work?"
"Well, son. They take a lot of.... I don't know, son."
My approach is along those lines. I explain what I can until I reach the limits of my knowledge, and when the next "Why?" comes I tell her I just explained that to her. Usually this is met with another "Why?", at which point I distract.
"Hey, you wanna watch Thomas?"
At least I tried my best, right? I just hope she doesn't figure out that if she asks "Why?" enough she's going to get a cookie or be able to watch a show.
Lane Cutters Can Eat Shit and Die
There is a bridge that I have to cross daily while working. It is the only bridge into and out of town, barring the one completely out of your way to the south, and the one completely out of your way to the north. It was in rough shape, so it is being completely replaced, which means each direction has been cut down to one lane and the two-lane road leading up to it merges into one lane just after the stoplight before the bridge.
This is, of course, clearly labeled. A good mile before the light is a giant light-up sign informing drivers of the impending merge just beyond the light. If I'm running a little bit late, the big factory in town changes shifts and traffic across the bridge becomes a slow crawl stretching through the light, but never that I've seen past that gigantic warning sign.
Yet, when there is a long line of traffic in the one lane, waiting to get across the bridge, there is inevitably an asshole every other minute that flies past everyone in the soon-to-close lane until they reach the construction barrels where they rudely shove their way into the line of traffic. You assume they must be in that lane to turn at the light until you see them fly right through it and the rage ensues. Allow me to provide an even better example of what complete pieces of shit these people are.
Have you ever been at a grocery store with only one lane open and a long line ahead of you? When you were in that line, did anyone walk straight past everyone in the line toward the closed checkout lane ahead, only to shove their way into the line of people waiting at the open one at the last possible second? NO! Of course they didn't, because if they did someone would probably punch them in the face!
A lot of people talk about trolls on the Internet being empowered by their anonymity, and I think it's the same exact thing when people are in their cars. They know that they are being raging assholes when they do stuff like that, but they're confident that no one is going to merge their car into the side of their SUV like they might with do with their fist into their face at the grocery store.
Do me a favor: don't be an asshole. I don't mean only when you're face-to-face with another human being, I mean all the time.
Proper New Year's Resolutions
I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions, probably because they were always doomed to fail. One Kevin Smith discussed the notion of people having a "present bias" -- their future selves are perfect beings with which they can place all of their dreams and aspirations, confident in the fact that they will achieve them, just...later. There's a really good TV show on right now.
A New Year's resolution is the epitome of that. Everyone makes them, but probably something like 0.001% of them are ever achieved. So, I usually spare myself the disappointment of realizing I've failed to complete the tasks I've given myself for the year. But then I was reading through Pete Davison's first One A Day post and was kind of struck by the idea of making attainable and broad resolutions that I can easily achieve if I put my mind to it. I'll check back with you in a year and find out what my percentage was.
1. Take back my pant size: I keep telling myself I'm gonna drop a good 60 pounds and lose the beer gut that has never even had any beer in it. In all likelihood I never will, so I'm going to start taking baby steps toward that goal. This year? I would love to be able to put on the 38 waist Dickies pants I have without sucking in and stretching. I can still wear other pants in size 38, but Dickies are much tighter.
2. Improve (or take steps toward improving) our life: A new job; signing up for some sort of classes that might help me in working toward a new job; finding a house that we can afford. I'll take anything, really.
3. Keep somewhat up to date on the video games of 2011: At the end of every year I get a harsh realization of how little current gaming I did in the last 365 days. I'd like to at least play enough 2011 releases to be able to make a top 10 list.
4. Make a sizable dent in my gaming backlog: I always feel guilty when I buy a new game because of all the games I have sitting around that I haven't even touched. I'd like to start crossing games off of that pile of shame I've got going.
5. Read more: I don't have a ton of books lying around, but the percentage of the ones that I've actually read is embarrassingly high. By the end of the year I will have read these books that have been on my shelf for far too long:
We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 by Eric Davidson
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer
Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens
Igniting a Revolution by Various Authors
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger
Syrup by Maxx Barry
On Writing by Stephen King
My Boring-Ass Life by Kevin Smith
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Of course, if I find any of them particularly boring I can stop reading and still cross them off my list. Some of them have been lent to me with the insistence of quality, others gifted to me at Christmas or such, and a few were purged from the belongings of an acquaintance with whom I haven't had contact in several years -- so who knows if I'll like them. I've gotta leave myself an out if they completely blow.
And those are my modest resolutions. Wish my future self luck in completing them. I certainly could use it.
Time to Rest
When I got home at 8 or so I would normally feel the need to write my next article, but given that I've shifted my goals in life I reassured myself that there was nothing I needed to do and went back to bed. Throughout the day I mostly laid in bed and watched comedy specials on Netflix.
After dinner Emmy came upstairs with me and we watched Toy Story 3 and some Thomas the Tank Engine episodes as we snuggled up together. At 11 at night I went off to deliver again, through the middle of a snow storm, of course. When I finally finished at 8am or so my knee felt a little better but I reassured myself I could get some more rest and headed upstairs to climb back in bed with my wife and daughter instead of plopping down with the laptop for more work.
Well, I'm awake again, and guess what? My knee feels a thousand times better, my stomach is no longer sour, my head doesn't hurt, and I feel like chowing down on a big plate of food. I feel refreshed again.
Long story short, if I was still attempting to pound out articles on a regular basis for at least two websites then I would probably still be super tired, grumpy, and limping around the house. It feels good to be able to get a little rest when I need it.
New Year Resolution: Shift Life Focus
You know how they expect you to know what you want to do with the rest of your life before you're even out of high school? Almost seven years after graduation I still don't have a clue -- writing was just my best guess. I went about life the completely wrong way based on what society expects.
I was stumbling through community college with absolutely no direction when I took a semester off to get married. We found out we were having Emerson maybe a month later as she was obviously conceived on our honeymoon. Most people wait until they're settled down with stable jobs before they think about kids, but that's mostly a lot of excuses for not being ready. It might have taken some convincing from my wife to get me out of the mindset that we needed to have our career paths in order first, but Emmy was by no means unexpected like most of our family assumed.
And thank GWAR for her. Well, GWAR would probably sell her for crack or something, but thank that hard-working semen for her...or something. Either way, my daughter is the best thing in my life and I would lick dirt off of worms for a living if that's what it took to pay the bills and buy her toys. But back to the point of this article.
A good two years ago when I decided I would pursue writing as a career, it was mostly because that was something I enjoyed doing, but also because I wanted a job that my kids would be proud of. Flash forward to a few weeks ago and I was getting home from delivering as many papers as I could possibly fit into the day, only to plop down with the laptop and pour over emails about the website I was trying to run or the other one I had just gotten hired at.
So I'm done. Well, not done done. It would be completely stupid of me to just throw everything away at this point, but I'm shifting my focus. It probably sounds like, "Waaah, becoming a better writer was too HARD!!!" but I'm gonna stop trying to ascend in the games journalism field for awhile and just plateau. My personal blog fell into complete misuse for huge swaths of time, and with this here One A Day Project I aim to change that and hopefully have something to show a year from now. Like, a year in my life. For the future's sake...or some shit like that.
I'll also keep Cerebral Pop up and running and chugging out regular content that I feel like writing, as well as moderate for Bitmob. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much of a change, but trust me, the simple fact that I'm not always thinking about how to advance my writing career is a huge weight off my shoulders. Everything I write now will be entirely my own, which probably means there will be far more misplaced commas. But maybe I'll start to enjoy writing again.
I also have my mind set on starting classes again, maybe getting into electrical work or something, so I may have to shuffle some of the Bitmob and Cerebral Pop stuff if that gets in the way. We'll see. So, like I said, I'm not gone, just changing tracks for awhile.
I'll leave you with a fitting video. It comes from the final moments of the last episode of Louie, Season 1. After trying and failing to fit in at a club where he really doesn't belong, Louie heads home to his children. In a lot of ways I think this clip fits me perfectly. I don't really fit in with the writing world. I could probably make it with a lot of hard work, but there will always be a disconnect in my vocabulary and ability to analyze a topic. And ultimately being a parent is my real calling in life; whatever I do for a living comes second to that.
When Even Writings Lost It's Fun, Your Fucking Breaking
Yeah, I know that should be you're. And maybe the you're right there should have quotations around it. I'm just having a lot of trouble giving a shit about any of that right now. So maybe it's a joke. Or a passive aggressive way of letting off steam. Who knows.
I used to really love writing. I would sit in the back of my middle school class -- not paying attention to a word that was said -- writing pages and pages. I'd invent characters, and villains for those characters, and describe the grand adventures they'd go on. None of that was for a class, or to better myself as a writer so I could have a future in it; it was just because I enjoyed doing it.
A couple years ago I had graduated from high school and taken all of the basic classes I could take in the local community college. I still had no idea what to do next. I guess it should have been a hint that in all of that time, writing never once sprung to my mind. Still, when the light bulb finally went off I thought I'd found my answer.
Several years down the road, I kind of hate writing. When I started this..."journey", I would sit down in the morning and just start typing. The thoughts would flow from my head down to my fingers and in a half hour or so I'd have a whole article. Not only did writing it feel great and make me happy, but I was always damn proud of my creation.
Nowadays I agonize over every comma placement. I slowly write something over the course of several straight hours (A gap of free time I never have in my life, which means my kid is ignored the entire time and by the time I finish my wife is pissed off at me), then I go back over it 3 or 4 times, checking every detail. This process isn't at all fun, but it's what real writers have to do, right? So I submit the article, hoping I did my editors proud. Inevitably I am met with a laundry list a mile long showing me all of the grammar mistakes I made, and a majority of the time one of them says I need to do a major rewrite of part of the article.
Don't get me wrong, I'm damn lucky to have gotten to where I am today, and it's an honor to have the opportunity to improve my writing under the tutelage of some of the biggest names of video game journalism. Still, I'm starting to worry that in turning one of my favorite hobbies into work, I might have ruined it for myself. I wonder if I should stop trying to pursue a career in writing, and just do it for fun again.
Obviously this is taking the easy way out and pissing away the chance I have to improve my skills, learning from the best. But, you know, it sure would be nice to spend some more time with my kid and less time slumped over, stressed out about where to place a comma. I've always been one for taking the easy road.
Stubborn Determination or Selfish Disregard?
As the end of high school approached, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. As I enrolled in the nearest community college, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The one thing I was sure about was the woman I was with, and as our wedding grew closer, I stopped signing up for classes. Within a month or so of our wedding, we found out our daughter was on the way, so I never went back.
Once the whirlwind of the pregnancy was over, and then the onslaught of my first year of parenting ever, I started to think about what was quickly passing me by. I still had no idea what I was going to do, and it was becoming pretty apparent that newspaper delivery wasn't really going to cut it. It was an episode of 1Up FM, and the answer to that age-old question, "How do you get into game journalism?", that finally started me on this journey, and I haven't stopped since.
I have, however, gone back and forth a thousand times this past year. I never even questioned what a career in video game journalism would be like, I just knew that it was the first thing I knew I really wanted and every time I sat down to write, it made me happy. But after more than a year trying, I'm starting to get discouraged, and along with that comes the questioning.
What do I hope will happen? Do I think I'll land a salary gig right away? Chances are, if I'm lucky, I'll get some freelance gigs. I'm not even sure if I can support a family on struggling to get freelance gigs until I can finally get hired on staff at some outlet. Looking around this industry, most of the well-known freelancers are single, or at least kid-less.
Then there's the time. It seems to be the general consensus that I'll be spending a lot of time on the computer writing up news, tracking down interviews, getting quotes, researching leads, and pitching stories. Though, the job I have now means absolutely no days off, and I do it every single day, come home and take care of/play with Emerson, and get more writing done than a lot of others. I imagine I'd be able to handle the time requirements of a game journalism career, and maybe even be less busy than I am now, but I'm really just assuming.
So why do I keep going? I've read multiple pieces by those with similar aspirations about giving it up and concentrating on family, and it's given me pause, but they all have backup plans. I haven't thought of anything else I'd want to do with my life other than writing, so I guess there isn't much as to do but keep on trying.
You know all of that "follow your dreams" stuff they tell you about? I suppose it sounds cliche, but I guess this is my dream. Yeah, I know, it's every gamers dream at some point, but it makes me happy when I sit down and write something. I enjoy brainstorming new ideas for articles, thinking of creative angles for them, and when I unleash it to the world it feels like I've accomplished something. Getting everyone their newspaper everyday doesn't ever feel like much of an accomplishment, and it certainly isn't something I've ever been proud of.
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