pre-vacation consumptions
It’s a week before my vacation so the only thing I’m really consuming is the precious hours of work i have left before being off for a week. In the meantime here are some stupid things I’ve been writing + some things I’ve been consumed with1.
FFXIV
I realized Tuesday that I’ve spent a collective 949 hours2 playing FFXIV, which is probably the longest I’ve ever played any game. I go through periods where I don’t play for a while then log back on and play again. I’ve always been a sucker for MMOs primarily because I love a good checklist of items to do, and MMOs are full of that type of content.
Right now i’m working on maxing out my Gatherer gear, item level, materia, and working on getting my final relic tool which results in spreadsheets that look like this:
With 949 hours I’ve managed to:
Complete all the MSQ
Level all of my crafters to max level of 90
Level botanist/miner to level 90
Get multiple relic weapons
Get my relic gathering tools
Bought a house
Joined a free company
Got all healers to max level
Got 3/4 ranged DPS to max level (red mage is at 83)
Do a bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember
Of the games I’ve played in my life, FFXIV has so much staying power too. Probably because I started it during the pandemic when I was stuck inside all day. It’s also the one where I actually feel some sort of attachment to my main. Normally when I create a character in a game I don’t really care about them once I’m finished, but my little Lala scholar sticks with me and it brings me a lot of dread to know sometime in the future he’ll just disappear.
She's Out, He's Still In - Where Should We Begin
I really like the Where Should We Begin podcast but I probably spend too much time listening to it and suddenly believing it explains my entire self when really it doesn’t. This is one of those rare episodes where you start off sympathetic to the person losing his wife and then quickly do a 180 and are like “nope, you should definitely leave him".”
What I really like about listening to Esther Perel (regardless if she’s actually respected or not, idk anything about that) is her approach to romance and relationships as a continual conversation and valid beyond its longevity. I think almost everyone who has fallen out of a serious or important relationship has a bit of that “I failed to feel” and in this episode in particular she really tries to hit home that a natural course of some relationships is actually the end of a relationship.3 Longevity is nice and can be valid but sometimes people fall out of love and that shouldn’t impact either person’s opinion of themselves.
Anyways, this is a really good one because it shows how relationships can really just sort of starve despite both people clearly knowing what they internally want.
something that’s not part of a short story
In the back of an Uber he tells me a catholic4, and I tell him I was raised that way but denounced it when I was in middle school. Drunk and high we have sex and lay in his raised bed talking about God. He tries to convert me, wondering how someone can move through the world not believing in something higher than themselves. I try to string together an intelligent sentence but pass out soon from pure exhaustion.
At night I dream about my grandparents, their deaths, and funerals. How my grandfather clung to life, wasting away in a hospital bed. How I held the casket and walked him down the long aisles of a church where the pastor barely knew his name. There, I watched my dad suffer through the loss of his father. I watched as he, in an ill-fitting suit, struggled to make the walk up. The music started, the certainty of what was about to happen piling up in a paralyzing sense of depression. How my mother grabs his hand, instinctively, and leads the way.
She has done this before, both her parents now dead. She is an expert at tragic and inevitable loss. When her father dies I am too young to understand its impact. When her mother dies, I am just young enough for it to wreck my entire life. After her mother dies she never visits a church again.
In the morning I escape before he wakes up. Hungover, I make my way back home in silence.
A snippet of something I don’t remember writing
I spent the month of July indoors: a consequence of the oppressive heat and an improperly installed coffee shop sign that fell on me in late June. Gabriel was away on vacation. Or holiday as his dialect assumed. I had no reason to work anymore, the settlement from the coffee shop was large enough that I could rehabilitate safely and then spend a few more years after traveling the world or reading books in other coffee shops (with slightly better-installed signage) from morning til evening.5
An intro to something that could become a short story
Each summer they came out here: to rust-coated land that stretched and spiraled out in marshy estuaries toward the Texas coast. They would spend weekends crowded here in a too-small shotgun-style house, mostly doing chores. His parents were always working. His father would wake up at five in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, go fishing alone, and come back around 8:00 to start a neverending cascade of lawn mowning or siding repair, or deck painting. His mother would pace around cleaning floors, dusting shelves, and cooking meals. During the weeks she worked a high-paying job from the comfort of her at-home office. What she did during these times was always a mystery to []. In the summers, when he was home from school [], and [] would rarely see her move. She would stay at her desk, taking calls, clicking screens, and coming out from her office door to tell the two of them to be quiet while she was working.6
sidenote i’m trying to get people I know to do guests posts about the thing consuming them currently. if i kinda know you and you’re interested in that, lmk.
i wish this was a charming quality that someone found this interesting or valuable but as it stands right now it’s just channeled mental illness.
This is part of my frustration with how society treats the idea of marriage. It’s conceived as the final point in a relationship or the ultimate expression of love because it expressly invokes an endless idea of love. I really hate that. I really do not want someone to promise me they’ll always love me. I want someone to tell me they love me and if they ever stop loving me they’ll tell me, find some way of breaking off a relationship that minimizes harm, and continue to hold a special place in their heart for the time we did spend together.
A man did tell me he was a Catholic in an Uber on our way back to his place. It was relatively soon after I broke up with someone and I was desperately dating people. He was otherwise incredibly nice though he was too short and his bed too high to properly top me. I blocked him on Instagram because I was having an extremely manic post-breakup period and didn’t just want to tell someone eh, I wasn’t that into them.
The consequence of writing a bunch of stuff is that you always have 20+ Google docs all named Untitled that contain paragraphs of something you wrote in a fugue state between two Wednesday meetings.
Probably more about me than not, this is my experience of how I spent my summers as a child. I don’t think anyone has really got that, maybe Zach does because he’s been there a few times…