Saturday, September 25, 2010

Need My Space

Closing the door, leaning backwards in my chair, music in the speakers surrounding me, a small whiteboard at my side, computer humming, feet up towards the wall like in the old days when I lived with my parents in a very small room. A lamp. Maybe a small TV. Some pictures on the walls. Some books on programming and game development in a pile. Knowing that the only one there is me.

Maybe sing or hum or whistle along to some songs playing on the speakers. Thinking things out loud just to hear the ideas and reasoning, to easier reflect on them as they leave my head and then come back again. Knowing that the only one to hear any of it is me.

Only having to bother about when I feel hungry or sleepy, eating whatever I want whenever I need it. Organizing things my way, clearing my head of everything else at the very moment the door closes. Being able to focus on the present or to dream away, getting ideas like before, and not only when I sit under the shower. Being able to work with my job or my own projects, closing out everything if I want to, knowing that when I log out of messengers and the like the only line to me is my mobile phone which people seldom call to unless it's something important.

I really need to live alone. I can't reach my full potential otherwise. I miss the days when I had an idea and then sat down and gave it a decent shot. Maybe I never finished it, but I got far enough to get something out of it. Today, I can't dive that deeply, I can't get into it as much, because I always have someone else to think about. Someone else to relate to, to make sure I time everything with like eating and sleeping and watching TV. Someone that wouldn't like to listen to my music, someone that I wouldn't want to hear my thoughts as I speak them to myself, someone that does something distracting or watches shows on TV when I want to focus, someone that doesn't sit and play games when I'm irritated by some difficult job task that I simply must finish before tomorrow.

It's enough for me to be able to have friends or a loved one over, maybe for dinner, maybe for late nights of gaming, maybe even for several days and nights in a row, as long as I know that at the end of it I get to close the door and vanish into my own space for a while. To retire into my own black box.

This is where I try ideas and thoughts out, where I play out scenarios and events in my head, to see how they feel. This is where I can decide not to get dressed in the morning and stay that way until night falls. This is where I can eat whatever I want just because I want to. This is where I recharge my batteries which makes it possible for me to have the energy to do everything else.

If we live together, we'll maintain that lifestyle together. But there must also be lots of time and room to be alone. Completely, unmistakably and absolutely alone. Right now, I just want to live alone regardless. I'm tired of feeling part of my creativity and motivation constantly swirl down into a drain. There is no rest, I must constantly and actively keep afloat instead of just being able to relax and take a breather.

So there are actually more things on my horizon lately; more potential projects in the pipe. I like that. I'm ditching the course in book-keeping for sure. It was interesting in the beginning but I think I'll let those with a passion for it do it instead. I'm a ways into the business planning course, and I love it. It's in phase with my life and mentality. The Kanji project is drawing closer to an end, at least for my part, and I won't miss it. Another project has just begun but more about that later (again) as everything gets on track. Suffice to say it's game development, and there is not a single shred of academic studies involved for me, and I'll not even be the main programmer.

Currently I'm staring at my work computer next to me and at the compiler errors in Flash. I did something wrong in my code, got an error, and now it doesn't seem to matter if I correct it - it still gets stuck on the same error. I actually added in "vaginachildren" (in Swedish, of course) randomly to see if I could get it to fire more errors but nope, still the same error. I have no idea what it's doing, and if there's something I've learned with Flash it's that you can be sure that the error description you get usually have nothing to do with the actual error. I fucking hate Flash. The DOS based game I made 10 years ago did more than this piece of garbage, and when you did something wrong, you could usually quickly track the bug down and squash it.

I do have my own ideas I would like to cultivate during my free time. But, as it looks, I won't really be able to for quite some time. The little energy I have left when I get home doesn't really have a chance to recharge until I go to sleep.

I will write more about both my job and my own projects in not too long. Maybe not write so much about my private projects as I'll try to show them instead.

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