Passion

I recently decided that I needed more motivation to do stuff I should really be doing on a daily or weekly basis. Apparently "being good" is not a motivator for me. At all.  

So I've kind of developed a (largely arbitrary) system of points and rewards. I get a point for doing each thing I should be doing (I have a spreadsheet with about ten different columns for specific tasks), and can spend the points on stuff I really shouldn't be doing. For instance, if I leave for work in the morning before 7:40 (I usually leave around 8:20, but I really do need to get out of the house earlier), I get a point. If I leave for work before 7:40 four days in a row, I can spend $10 (and 10 points) on anything I want from Etsy.

The rewards all cost some number of points, which helps force me to choose which things I want to spend my money on (instead of getting sushi once a month and buying yarn once a month and trying to save up money for a spinning wheel, I now have to choose - sushi with these points? yarn? or save those points for a wheel?)  and also takes away all that nagging guilt I constantly have about doing "fun" things. Now I know I've earned them.

I felt pretty ridiculous about this system (what am I, a third grader? I have to bribe myself to leave for work on time??), so I wasn't planning to tell anyone at all about it, until I heard a radio interview on NPR that reminded me of a TED talk I watched a couple months ago... and then, two days after I heard the NPR interview, I read an interview on a gaming blog I follow. All three were starring the same person, Jane McGonigal, who just published a book called "Reality is Broken". Her thesis statement is that games are useful to society and to human culture, and that gamers are a vast, untapped resource, a population of people who are very very good at solving problems and are not afraid to fail. Her work also touches on the concept that video games are a lot of fun, and reality isn't, and there should be a way to change that - to make reality more fun, more engaging, and more rewarding - and to make failing less of a risk in real life. It's an interesting set of concepts. She posits that if we could turn real life into a series of games, we'd all be happier - and a lot more productive.

This idea isn't totally new, either. There is a game called FoldIt I've been aware of for a couple of  years. It's a game designed by biochemists to help get solutions to the protein folding problem (which is, basically, how do all the proteins in your body know how to fold up into precise, perfect 3-dimensional structures, every single time? especially when the desired conformation is not always the lowest energy?). Players learn a little bit about the basics of protein folding, then play the game to help solve more difficult conformations. 

There's also a website called ChoreWars. The basic concept is that a family can sign up, and each person gets to choose an avatar (something D&Dish, like a ranger or a druid or whatever). As each person does chores, they earn experience points and treasure. I thought about signing up for this, except I don't have anyone to play against...

Jane also talks about a game where anyone in the world could parse through data coming out of Haiti just after the earthquake, to determine relevance and origin of location of text messages and other information, to help find and help survivors. Really! People from all over the world sorted through this information in order to directly help other people! Games can be very meaningful, in addition to providing entertainment. 

Entertainment and happiness shouldn't be looked down upon, though. It should be okay to enjoy games. Life in general should be more enjoyable. It shouldn't be weird for me to strive for a streak of early mornings or to encourage myself to bring my lunches instead of buying them, and to be rewarded for accomplishing those things.

I listened to this video this evening while gathering herbs in Deepholm (the realm of earth elementals, underneath the world of Azeroth). I was also chatting with my boyfriend, who was taming raptors (while sitting in a semi truck in another state).  I think the story at the very end, about why games were invented in the first place, and how they're serving the same function now, is particularly interesting (skip to about 37 minutes in if you just want to hear that bit).


Because I stayed up and listened to this, I didn't get a point for going to bed by 11. But if I make it out of the house by 7:40 tomorrow, I'll still hit my 4-day streak and get my reward. 

What are your thoughts?

 Look! An entry!

I got a new job.  It is an awesome new job.  I will no longer be formatting, copying and pasting, and writing diplomatically phrased emails to idiots.

I will be a lab manager for a research lab at the University of Michigan. I'll be in charge of some undergrads who will be in charge of some transgenic mouse colonies. I'll be keeping the lab running smoothly and safely. I'll be doing my own research project. :-)  I start at the end of June.

Lately I've been made kind of painfully aware of how not anonymous the internet is, so I'm trying to be as diplomatic about this announcement as possible. There are things about my current job I do like, and I will miss my coworkers. (Most of them.)

But really, I am absolutely thrilled about this new job. It is an AMAZING opportunity, and I cannot wait to get back into science and research. I MISS doing research. I miss being on the cutting edge. Just being around the cutting edge. SEEING the cutting edge.  I miss the university environment and the culture of academic thought. I miss being challenged every day.  I miss being able to get up and walk around as part of my job, and not being stuck sitting at a computer all day every day (I've gained weight since I moved to Michigan. Not a ton, but 10 pounds feels like a ton on my frame).

This does push back plans to move to California. /cry

Yesterday I went to Jim's parents' house to go swimming. The weather was beautiful for the first time in over a week (damn you, you stupid rain. stupid midwest cold rainy summer of annoyingness!), and I desperately needed the exercise.  Of course, they ended up inviting me to stay for dinner, so I got to hang out with his parents and his brother and sister. It was a fun evening. I threw a frisbee for their three dogs for about an hour (one of the golden retrievers will take flying leaps into the pool, over and over and over again. It's hilarious. We finally had to put the frisbee away because she was wheezing and still trying to leap into the pool), and then did laps for a while. I definitely feel less sluggish today.

It occurred to me that these people will very likely be my in-laws someday. I don't know why this didn't occur to me, y'know, a year ago when we were talking about rings. Maybe it's because yesterday was actually the first time I've been over there without Jim (other than when we lived there, obviously, though actually Jim was almost always around even then).  It's a very interesting thought, like some part of the nebulous future has kind of gelled up a little bit.  It's comforting, but disconcerting at the same time, in kind of the same way deciding on a graduate school disconcerted me. It's... you know what, this is probably worthy of its own entry.

Jim is taking me to Mackinac Island for the weekend (or so he says. he won't even be home until tomorrow morning, so we'll see how the schedule turns out in reality).  I've been to Mackinac the town, but never the island, which is apparently a second small town that's very old-timey. There are no cars on the island. I'm not sure why this is a big deal, but every time someone mentions Mackinac Island, they mention that there are no cars.  I think it has to do with the Michigan "cars are god" mentality; lack of cars is a huge thing.  Anyway, said town/island are also famous for fudge, and I think I can make Jim take me on a horse-drawn carriage ride, and this weekend is the start of some sort of Lilac Festival, so it should be a good time.  

In gaming news, I've been playing Oblivion and WoW.  Oblivion is interesting in that it's taken a lot of the good parts of Morrowind, added in a few new good things, and then a few new ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE things.  The inventory and stats interface is just freakin' awful.  They also removed the teleportation spells, but they made it so you can instantly travel to certain key areas on the map you've been to before. They turned lockpicking and speechcraft into minigames, both of which are just awful in implementation, but I do like the concepts in theory.  I also seem to just completely suck at playing, so almost every mob I've encountered so far (other than like, rats) has been really hard for me to kill. I'm clearly doing something wrong.  But anyway. It hasn't fully pulled me in yet, but, as with Morrowind, I find myself wanting to play it just so I can level alchemy (why yes, I do need to get back into bench science) and spellcasting. Sigh.

In WoW I've been playing pretty casually, working on some random old-world goals (like getting every cooking recipe in the game, including that annoying purple one that takes you through an extremely painful quest line and reputation grind), leveling a few alts, and actually reading quest text. The next expansion is going to drastically change the game world, and I wanted to see the Alliance side of things before it goes away.  I also stumbled across a guild made entirely for low-level dwarven hunters, so I created one and joined up and it's been a lot of fun so far (and it's made me want to play my level 80 hunter more). They have a large event planned for tonight, so it should be interesting to see what they came up with for 300 level 19 hunters to do.

Other than that... Not much is going on. I made a small silk shawl/scarf thing last month, but haven't knit much else. I've been reading a little bit, but nothing really notable.  Jim is gone a lot, and I miss him.  Claire is going insane with the weather being warmer and the porch door being open. She's started clawing the screen. It's far enough gone now I'm almost not bothering to stop her anymore; we're going to have to replace it either way. Sigh. That cat...
She actually woke me up the other night trying to chew on some dangly earrings I'd fallen asleep wearing. That's right. She was trying to chew on them while they were IN MY EARS.

It's overcast again. It better not rain in Mackinac this weekend.

 If you don't play Warcraft, this will make no sense to you.  So.

1) I talked to my mom a couple of days ago and she related a really cute Elena story. I guess they bought a bunch of hummingbird feeders (they needed more than one...??). They hung up a few of them one day and were successful in observing hummingbirds that afternoon, so they went out the next day to hang up some more, at which point Elena looked at my mom, pointed at one of the feeders, and proclaimed very matter-of-factly, "A hummingbird is not a lobster." As though my mother had been confused!

Kids are ridiculously cute sometimes.

2) Claire just alerted me that she was out of food by sneezing repeatedly and then glaring at me. I really wish I spoke her language....

3) I'm horribly addicted to an awful thing called PonyIsland. Whatever you do, don't go to ponyisland.net and sign up and begin breeding pixel ponies. Please. The My Little Ponies will eat your soul. Oh, and if you do sign up, DEFINITELY don't tell them oceanaura sent you, 'cause you wouldn't want to give me credit for stealing your soul after I warned you and everything.
But look at how cute mine are!


4) I read back through some journal entries, which is my wont about every four or five months, and discovered once again that I am brilliant and funny. This encourages my desire from earlier this week to write more stories! I should finish the unrequited love among coral story.... Actually, I think it's pretty much done, except I feel stupid for how little I know about coral and how ridiculous this story would be if read by coral-studying scientists.
I also started a story about unrequited love among humans about the same time as the coral, and got three pages into it before I realized
a) you cannot write a happy story about unrequited love without it becoming a story of requited love
b) you cannot kill off the main characters in order to solve this problem if you're writing the story because a teenage friend of yours asked for it
c) I'm never going to get my payment of two stacks of Buzzard Meat if I can't figure out how to end this story.

5) There is no number five, because I sat here for ten minutes and went back to 3 and added more pictures and now we're just going to pretend that didn't happen and move straight on to 6.

7) I lied about 6.

8) I got a callback for the insurance company, as mentioned in the last entry, and I'm really really excited about it. I'm too sleepy right now to be coherent excited about it, but some of the things I rambled on about when I called my mom Wednesday after the informational seminar were "direct meaningful application" "heaps and heaps of money" "offices in California" "twice the retention rate of their competitors" "management track available if you progress quickly through training" and "compensation during said training".
Also coming to mind right now is the phrase "my ticket out of here".
Also also is "I think I'm going to be okay." Which, you know, is something I think like, every two months, and then promptly forget, but hey. At least it's always a refreshing surprise when it pops up in my head again!

9) There isn't really a 9, but while I like 8 and it's one of those nice symmetrical even numbers that satisfies all manner of my OCD quirks, 9 has been neglected lately, and really, it's got that nice 3^2 thing going for it. And this just seemed like a list of 9. You know?

Qualifying is absolutely everything that everyone told me it would be. I barely have time to breathe. And my brain has been in a constant state of mush since Monday, which is really too bad because I have eighteen papers I need to read by Sunday night, and I really wish I was exaggerating that number. But I'm not.

I got that door, and it blends into the bookcases and you totally can't tell there's a room back there. I live in a secret room! It's so awesome!

I've gotten addicted to the new Shins album all over again, and I keep getting Regina Spektor songs stuck in my head, even though I haven't decided yet whether or not I like her.

I think I've spent less time playing Warcraft this week than I've spent drinking coffee, so it looks like everyone's fears about me getting addicted were unfounded.
Although I have spent a LOT of time drinking coffee.

Aaaand now I'm gonna go read some more papers. And resist making coffee.



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Also, I've been thinking a lot and I'm hoping I'm becoming a less psychotic person. But somehow I doubt it.

Also also, summer is DEFINITELY over, and I really miss it.