12.31.08
Posted in holidailies at 4:52 pm by krystyn
What can I say about this year? I am not even sure if I know quite how I would categorize it.
I was hired for my dream job, at my dream company, just before this year began. I bought a daruma from the origami paper shop downstairs from the office and filled in one eye. After a mere few weeks of contract work, I was asked to move to California and work there permanently. I filled in the other eye. 2008 began, and I had a series of adventures that were all too believable, and yet no less awesome for what they were.
When I got laid off, I went back to the office much later that same night and left what amounted to an altar on my desk: one business card, two clementines, and the daruma. In a sense, the job had gone up in smoke. It seemed only appropriate to leave the daruma in that place to burn in the metaphorical flames. (And lest you think I am being overly negative, let me also remind you that sometimes fire brings forth a phoenix.)
And yet, I still have a career. The job itself did not define me, nor did it constrain me from feeling lucid and capable upon leaving. That counts for something.
I am working on the frustration inherent in the disparity between effort expended, and results obtained.
I like to do a lot of prep work. I prepared for this new life, and now I don’t have it, and so now I am trying to figure out how to prepare for something that happened a few weeks ago. O for a time travel machine!
I don’t have the perspective, yet. I don’t have the right words to say that make sense, and show me to be a reasonable adult with a firm grip on her reality. I am treading water, muted by grief, about the stories I haven’t told you, about how my very limbs feel encased in ice.
Sometimes I think love is quite close by, and then I re-assess, and figure that I must be wrong. This back and forth is not a fun game. Things seemed easier when I was younger.
I face this arbitrary new year with trepidation and confusion. I am poised and ready to leap, to take risks, to change what needs to be changed, but the swimming miasma of colors just hasn’t reached focus yet. A godless wonder, me: feeling guidance and direction, courting destiny and making it my choice. It’s nice work if you can get it.
I take comfort in the small things. The blue lights strung up on my bed in my bedroom, the tiny container of makeup glitter I found in a box of old speech team trophies today, the smell of chicken pot pie when it’s done cooking, and the heavy enveloped feeling of the down comforter that I pull over me as I fall asleep at night.
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves. – William Shakespeare
Too right, Bill. 2009 is the year I will attempt, once again, for stability and comfort without also sacrificing my creativity and passion. I want to design games, or be an intrinsic and worthy part of the development process. I want to feel more love and sweetness in my life in the coming year. There has been a lot of detachment and protection, and I think it’s time to reverse that conveyor belt of emotion.
I dunno. Tonight is just another night. Rent is still due tomorrow. Time continues on, and calendars and lists are only as good as one makes them, after all.
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12.30.08
Posted in holidailies at 9:40 pm by krystyn
Last night was a pretty nice night. My friend Woody drove up to Glendale and after making fun of Thomas Kinkade for a while, we walked over to the Chinese place near my house, where the lady taking our order greeted us nicely, and then her eyes widened and she greeted me again more enthusiastically because she recognized me from the handful of times I’ve stopped in for sit-down dinners or carry-out over the last several months. Funny.
Bret was able to join us over at my apartment a bit later, knocking on my door as I was in the middle of showing Woody an epic battle (har) on the Suspense map in Unreal Tournament 3. It was actually a little bit hilariously depressing to say, “Oh, and there used to be this big gap in the rocks and rooftop here, and then they fixed it, and I –” and then I would fly over this spot in the Raptor, and those gaps were still there, glaringly obvious. “Haha!” I would laugh, in a weird sense of anti-triumph, “I totally bugged that!”
“And they didn’t fix it?” Woody asked incredulously.
“I … thought they did?” I replied, and I actually furrowed my brow, because suddenly, it felt like Backwards Day. I know I bugged it, because it was ‘my’ map, but that was back when we were testing for two other platforms that were not the 360. Is it possible that they regressed to an earlier build, or re-tweaked something that caused an old bug to re-occur? Quite possibly!
“You know,” said Woody, “when I play games and see stuff like that, I think, ‘why didn’t their test team catch that and fix it?’ – and now I know that they probably did!” I nodded and laughed. The development process for any game is a labyrinthine twine ball of esoteric progress. The only way over is through, but only every other Tuesday that falls on a full moon. The job gets done, but by the skin of our teeth. Etc.
I ran him through a bunch of maps, telling him funny stories about the stuff that used to be broken or completely different, scenery-wise: “See, this map did not have mountainous bookends to it. There used to be buildings here, and a long concrete tunnel, and a bunch of trees. But it was too much, the LOD would flicker in and out, and so they just made it all rock.”
“Oh, and this mesh here? Didn’t use to have collision on it. I would bug it, and then have everybody play a deathmatch with me. I’d get the Rocket Launcher, hide in this wall here, and point the tip of the weapon right at the outside edge of the wall and wait for dudes to run by.”
And then I’d catch myself, “Dude, I must be boring you. This must be insanely yawn-inducing.” Woody turned to me, looking a tiny bit like a kid on Christmas morning. “No! Actually, this is really fascinating!”
That was an awesome feeling, right there.
So Bret and Woody and I had brownies warmed up in the microwave, with mint chocolate chip ice cream over them, and we played Rock Band until far too late, when they had to head back to their respective homes for some shut-eye before work the next day. Me, I just gamely shrugged, and figured I’d sleep until whenever and then work on the old resume, or get rid of more stuff.
Which I did do, but under a miasma of weird sadness brought on by the fact that I really haven’t had a lot of social time like I did last night, and it was really nice and I forgot how much I just missed hanging out with a few people at a time, talking our heads off and playing some game. It’s just been too crazy in my immediate universe to have enough basic social contact since the moment I first decided I was going to pack up my entire life and go live somewhere entirely new and truly begin my career in the gaming industry.
And that, my friends, was back in February of 2007. Yikes.
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12.29.08
Posted in holidailies at 5:56 pm by krystyn
Picture frames slide right inbetween window ledges, chair backs and end tables line up, disappear.
Red beans and rice, cake flour, wheat flour, ready-made bread mix in cardboard, chocolate-covered ginger, old spicy cashews, eggs in their eggy cradles, angled and beveled pitchers of filtered water, combine, glow, dissipate. New music.
Things I want to sell, things I want to keep, things I want to send to my niece, things I want to give away, things I don’t even know why I have, things that keep coming back: spun, clicked, annotated, configured, obliterated.
Boxes of photographs, boxes of stationery, boxes of letters from my first real love, boxes of mix tape notes, trophies from speech tournaments, artwork faded and crumbling on construction paper, notebook paper, posterboard, cardstock, pieces of this time last year, chunks of 5 years old, whispers of birth, zero preparation for old age, combo bonus knockout powerup level up triple word score, new game +.
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12.28.08
Posted in holidailies at 9:29 pm by krystyn
I got the chance this past week to spend a little bit of time with my niece, Julia.
She is very very sweet.
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12.27.08
Posted in holidailies at 7:55 pm by krystyn
I am safe here in this little apartment, away from the outside world.
I am unpacking a box full of art supplies, and near the bottom are a bunch of old letters and things. I see some of the blocky horrible handwriting I always used to make fun of, and I think to myself that I am not really going to do what I usually do when I go through my things. I am not going to head down Memory Lane. Not tonight.
Tonight is for making a little headway. It’s hard. This stuff has sedimentary layers. Some of the layers are very important. I found a small card envelope stuffed full of old movie tickets. Many of them are heat-printed, so I can hardly even tell anymore what movie it was for originally, as the letters have faded right off the perforated paper.
Right now, I am trying to find the things that have nothing imbued; these are the items not imprinted with pieces of my soul, man. Those things gets separated out, and will either get given away or sold or recycled.
I have been through two cross-country moves, after I spent 4 or 5 years in an apartment that was a dumping ground for all of the other moves my family went through after my parents’ divorce, and after 4 years of living with someone else. The jumble is understandable, and almost enviable. There is a pretty decent record of how I got from there to here. It is a huge soup of time and memory, poured haphazardly into small cardboard book boxes.
What’s tricky is that some of these are time bombs, and they haven’t gone off yet. They haven’t gained their full potential for enlightenment and perspective. Others have been wrung dry, and yet still others reset every few years – a fuse that just needs a penny jammed in to complete the circuit.
If I may resort to an utterly nerdy analogy, these time bombs are sort of like those mysteriously sealed chests in Chrono Trigger. The amulet I’d use to unlock the memories isn’t charged, and I’m not in the right age to activate the full power of these things that I keep lugging around with me. Some of ’em will do a little something for now, but it’s better to wait, to sift out the chaff and pare down, and wait until later for the big reveal. But, I can re-box and re-organize and get down to the nitty-gritty, and prep for a day when I’ve a mind to visit some of where I’ve been, and see if it all lines up to where I’m going.
One thing remains true, though: I have lots and lots of boxes of crayons. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but there it is, nonetheless.
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12.26.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:32 pm by krystyn
Many people I know seem to have grown up with an innate sense of direction. Even if they were the sort to change majors a million times during their college years, or seemed to flit from job to job, there was an overtone or aura to them that suggested that, no matter what, things would fall into place.
I’ve felt like that at times, myself. There was a good period of time during high school (of all the times!) when everything I did felt like a building block. Ca-click, ker-chunk, each tiny little experience and interaction felt like part of a greater whole. I felt disappointments as keenly as any other 15 year old might, but my life was a sketchbook. That cute boy not liking me back, me stumbling and dropping my books all across the hallway during passing period, not getting the role I wanted in the Winter Musical, well. They were all theoretically very small events, to my mind. I’d seen my parents divorce, and I’d moved a handful of times before I even started my Freshman year. These slights to my ego were crosshatches, shading, embellishment. Occasionally, erased and forgotten.
I had an occasion to sit down and say important things to someone yesterday, and I walked away shaken, upset, sad, and like I failed. And yet, I am not sure how I could’ve done any better. For the first time in a while, I was at a complete loss as to what to do. The words that came out my mouth were awkward, and sounded to my ears like they were coming from way far away. They were in the wrong order. I started crying at one point, and my nose ran like I was a two year old having a tantrum. I was wiping at my face with tissues, and I said goodbye approximately half a dozen times, and I wondered if maybe I was just making a fool of myself. And then I felt stupid for worrying about that at all.
But when faced with the things I was really saying, and what I was really doing, I began to fall to pieces. This odd, juvenile detachment, as tear-stained as it was, seemed to be the only thing that kept me from completely flying off the handle, emotionally.
I feel stung, a whole day later, that I have somehow failed myself and everyone involved. That I am just not the person people think I am, and that my ability to find the right words simply dissipated. I was grocery shopping earlier, and the mundane activity suddenly put everything into a little sharper focus. The foreground pulled itself away in bas relief from the rolling countryside of my emotions: Nothing mattered, and everything matters. That it what the perspective gives me, a whole day later. Great. This doesn’t solve a damned thing.
I am reeling.
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12.25.08
Posted in holidailies at 2:42 pm by krystyn
Tired, with a headache. Possible caffeine withdrawal.
There was one Christmas when I was a kid where it had been snowy and cold and delightful leading up to the holiday, just like the television tells you it ought to be, but when the day dawned, the temperature was in the 60’s. Most of the snow had melted away, leaving only wet, sort of dirty white clumps of sno-cone snow, in and amongst the dead leaves and the beige-amber grass dead on the ground.
The smell was awful, to me: it was flat, metallic, sort of organic. We threw some windows open in order to ‘enjoy’ the warmth, but it was just wrong, the whole day. There was no smell of winter snap and dry wood and candleshine. There was just damp rottenness, and a feeling like the world might end.
This Christmas is a little like that, and not just because of the weather.
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12.24.08
Posted in holidailies at 12:39 pm by krystyn
When I was a child, I would get these books, one at a time, on a subscription. They were always about real people, and about a particular trait they possessed that allowed them to succeed at something great in their lives.
What you didn’t know about people like Marie Curie, Abraham Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, and the Wright Brothers is that every single one of them had an imaginary friend, some sort of creature taking the form of some instrumental item in that person’s life (a book, a test tube, a compass, etc.) who would appear and accompany the story’s hero, giving them advice and telling them that they were capable of achieving the thing they were setting out to do.
These imaginary friends appeared in their childhoods, and would follow them through their lifetime. The artwork for the book was very cartoony, but you would see each person age or become slightly more defined and sophisticated as they came into their own, achieved the things they had been working for their whole lives.
One of the things I love the most about this series is that moment when you get to the end of the story – there is a conclusion, a sense that you’ve just read a simple and child-like abbreviation of some great person’s life, and if you were brave enough, you could turn over the very last page and read a very adult-like biography of the person you’d just followed from childhood. At the top of the bio was a much more realistic pencil sketch of the person, and you felt like you knew her, because you’d just followed her from birth, practically.
And you knew a secret that the adults didn’t always know, which is that they all had a little voice inside telling them to keep on, keep going, that they were eventually going to be great in some amazing way.
Even though my little niece Julia is barely two, I am giving her three books from the series, and will send more as she gets older, and will have a little brother to read to. It’s my hope that she loves these books as much as I did.
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12.23.08
Posted in holidailies at 6:09 pm by krystyn
And I ask him if he remembers when I was so small, and if he remembers tucking me in so tightly I was a cocooned little pillbug of a child, and do you remember? do you remember? do you remember smushing me into the mattress so I would bounce back up, giggling? And because I was a pillbug wrapped tightly in a blanket, I could not fight back or do anything but laugh helplessly.
And I ask him if he remembers singing “Reveille” in a da-da-da-da-da-da sort of way in the morning, way too early for us mortal tiny young pillbugs on a Saturday when even the cartoons haven’t started up yet, and I tell him other things until I stop and look at the window and the grey day outside, and I laugh and feel my throat catch a little and say, “I suddenly can’t think of any stories, isn’t that dumb?”
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12.22.08
Posted in holidailies at 12:57 pm by krystyn
The scrape of a knife against toast almost burnt.
Birds chirping.
Windchime clanging and vibrating in the wintery rainy wind.
Coffee maker percolating and making rather quietly violent pops and bursts of steam-powered exclamation.
The thunk of the laptop lid closing as the cat sits on the laptop.
The boring white noise whine of the space heater.
The constant far-off rush of freeway noise.
Occasional cars motoring by at 5MPH along the side drive, by my kitchen window.
The floomph of bedclothes being shook out and laid flat on the mattress. Smaller ploomphs of pillows.
Padding of bare feet on hardwood floors.
Heart kerthunk, kerthunk, kerthunk.
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