can't be tamed

I'm going to explain why Plurk is the bane of my existence, and why I have been so much happier without it. Every time I go back, I inevitably see something that makes me twitch and close it again.

For a while, Plurk does make me feel, and I believe did make me feel, more in tune with people. It's amazing! Now I can be in touch with almost everyone, all the time! But the magic wears off. On Plurk, you're inundated with the thoughts of people who are near-strangers to you constantly, and there's a lot of reasons this might be problematic. Maybe you feel compelled to share things that didn't need to be shared. Maybe things you didn't even care about before now irritate you. Maybe you learn new, ugly things you didn't want to know about the people in your social circle. Maybe you just suffer overload: empathy fatigue and information flood all the time, every day, constantly sucking you in and sucking your spirit out.

And once the magic wears off, you're left with a lot of the following:

+ My games that you're not in are amazing!!!
+ Here are all the things I hate about that thing you love.
+ This is a passive-aggressive plurk designed to tell people you know and like that I am upset with them without actually saying so.
+ This is a plain old aggressive plurk about the players, characters, or situations that I hate.
+ Click here for the most depressing world and/or U.S. news update I could find.
+ Here is my inflammatory opinion about a topic that is going to make you grit your teeth, either because of me or because of the arguments within.
+ Today I feel like the worst human being in the whole world and I want to quit everything and move to Antarctica.
+ [meme] Tell me how awesome I am or I will assume you hate me, even though I ask you to do this in various ways four times each week!
+ [meme] Plot with me, if you're one of my favorite players!
+ I'm not "into" your game. or Your game is making me feel bad. or Your game is inferior to my other game.
+ Do you have an impending sense of doom about everything you enjoy yet? Let me add to it with my deliberately nonspecific brooding.
+ omg omg one of my 159 friends unfriended me on Plurk and I can't sleep until I find out who

Every single day. I have tried scaling back; I have 100 friends on Plurk but I only follow about 30 of them. But even then I get 40~ updates per hour. It's a lot. And it's exhausting. And it consumes you.

I'm not saying I'm not partially guilty myself, and I'm not saying you're a terrible person if you have ever made one of these plurks. On the contrary, I'm saying Plurk brings out that petty part of people, because Plurk is, itself, petty. These are all things present in our daily lives, but not pervasive. They're pervasive because 30 or 100 people updating you 2-3 times an hour on their life is bound to go there.

And when I shut myself off from that, I slowly get pieces of myself back. Like my patience and my tolerance and my enjoyment of my life.

I'm sorry, Plurk. Maybe it's just me. But I'm happier without you. I think we should stay casual acquaintances.

Today I discovered that I can stuff myself with sushi and still be at a really respectable calorie count, and also that holy shit I need to be paying more attention to saturated fat if my goal is to lower my diabetes risk. I'll start counting that too next time I can go shopping, orz.

...Tomorrow we'll see if I'm even awake enough to have food.


( Verdict: SUCCESS! more or less )

I deliver unto you all my weird Kingdom Hearts fic wherein Demyx is good at his job and Xigbar is amused by him forever.

In other news, yesterday I stuffed myself, and today I gorged on... vegetables, which I guess is the best possible thing to gorge on. Also, what am I doing with all these tiny pizzas. (But pizza is a vegetable, so it's still veggies.)


( Verdict: SUCCESS! more or less )

So here are the things the last 36 hours have wrought:

I want to move across the country.
I want to get a new job.
I want to buy a house.

Yeah. And the worst part is that all of that is within my grasp if I really want it. Our lease is up at the end of March and Colorado has not been good to me, jobwise. I've missed the east coast and I have my dad's money to finance a house with if I want. A house would actually be a cheaper monthly payment than renting. And then how grown-up would I be?! A homeowner! A regular big kid.

My mom mostly talked me out of trying to buy a home from halfway across the country in a place I've never lived in and don't know if I'm going to like, but I'm still secretly browsing houses squeeing at them. I don't even know.

And I'm finding jobs and applying to them, and so has rainfall, and she's already gotten a request for an interview. So. Freaking out right now.

I want to move. I want to get a job. I want a house!!

Right now the options are looking like Baltimore, Maryland area, or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.

I literally can't think about anything else at the moment. I've been ignoring my tags and Plurk for days. Someone help me. Or maybe I should just give in and take a short hiatus.

I'm calorie counting. In public so that you all can shame me if I fail to do so. The idea is to have four meals at 350 calories apiece throughout the day and to try to avoid straying above my daily allotment of 1400 calories. I will occasionally (and hopefully not often) indulge in "splurging" meals (usually Chinese or sushi) where I won't count, since I physically... can't. As long as the rest of the day / week is on track, it shouldn't be a big deal...

( Verdict: SUCCESS! )

Okay, Dreamwidth. I am getting really tired of your "helpful" hover menu. >_>

The hover menu, ideally, would tell me the name of the journal in question, the keywords for the icon in question, and -- if there is an option to change the person's status in my circle -- at least make it require a second fucking click.

How many times do I have to accidentally add friends or grant access or remove access or remove friends before I get out off my lazy behind and see where I would go to suggest that they change this? Let's find out.

I finished the second chapter of the Judith novel, but there are a few lines I'm definitely in need of a second pair of eyes on, so I'm waiting for Libby to get to looking at it before I post. I'll put it up before the end of the weekend, though -- I promised myself one per week.

I've been doing the world's tiniest writing, which I'll post on insincere after today's entry. After I get through my tags I'm going to try doing some non-tiny writing, too. Productive!

Finished Skyward Sword. Almost back to where I was in FFXIII. Hooray for Li being too sick to do anything other than play video games!


Also:

Does anyone roleplay Axel? Or know someone who would be willing to roleplay Axel with me? I'm in kind of a uniquely bad RP situation and I wanted to try museboxing/IM RPing it out.