New Year, New Goals

A Happy (and somewhat belated) New Year! I had the luxury this year of taking some time off before and after the New Year, which allowed me (for the first time ever, perhaps) to sit and do some serious thought planning about goals and resolutions for the next year.

This became an interesting process, as I suddenly discovered another fabulous web service: scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) which allows one to upload various written documents. On a lark, I looked, and sure enough, many of the modules from my roleplaying days 30 years ago were there. I ended up taking a walk down memory lane for an hour or two, and left feeling somewhat disturbed as well.

Disturbed? For two reasons: 1) I can see in the fairly innocuous games of the time the groundwork being laid for the relative acceptance of evil and occult in entertainment today; 2) One of the reasons that I got out was that "I would never make a living at it", as was true of video games as well (if you were of the era, you remember "How come you keep spending so much time and money on those things? You'll never get a job playing games!") - yet there is now a huge industry in both.

I'm not arguing for the fact that I should have remained in them - the subtle deadening of one's morals to the terrifying reality of evil should be enough. Still, it did give me pause as I went to look at my goals and resolutions this year. Why? Because they involved things that, if I can do them, will help me succeed but which, I fear, I have trouble keeping myself on track - as well as arguing for the benefits of them.

In this area, work is a terrible downfall: it mercilessly tends to focus down to the narrowest of all denominators, that which affects our work and (if we don't like our job) that which we would like to do instead of our job (which, being cast as a fantasy, has as little bias in reality). Part of this process over the weekend was addressing the fact that I find my imaginationatory and intellectual muscles hardening - I make excuses for not doing things instead of trying them because "I don't have the time" or "I don't have the money" - but more correctly, "I don't have the will."

So this year, on top of my goals and resolutions, there is one other: to escape what is becoming evident as the perilous thinking of middle age: it's too expensive, it's not time wise, and it's outside of my job category. This kind of thinking will end up in the very thing I have always feared: a petty paper pushing bureaucrat, marking time for retirement.