I believe this represents a major shift in my general disposition and level of motivation that's occured this past... I dunno... month. Let's review my drives and desires from then and now and see what we can learn:
A month ago I wanted to...
- Learn Japanese
- Read a (grown-up) book a week
- Make my apartment totally awesome and clean
- Meet tons of people, go out all the time, and discover all the awesome things the city has to offer
- Volunteer or get a second job
Now I want to...
- Read Harry Potter again
- Finish Season 5 of Charmed so I can get to reading Harry Potter again
- Play video games (a lot! Give me Katamari or give me death!)
You may have noticed that the entire current list can be performed on my couch. Yet, this isn't me just falling into laziness by default. I actually strongly desire to do these things. Today, I am going to a pride party at the JCC. I'm meeting someone I used to know in high school there, and it will be a great opportunity to make friends (gay Jew friends, the best kind). Ok, great! I don't want to go. If it weren't for the fact that I had to pre-register and it cost me $20, I would probably skip it in favor of the third Charmed disc and the remainer of my Pepperidge Farms Soft Batch cookies (there are only two, this is not a pig-out thing.)
Being fat and lazy is nothing new to me. I can't even count the number of hours I spent watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was in Indiana. But there, I had nothing else to do a lot of the time. And I always felt guilty about it. But now, the active drive to be passive makes it feel nothing but right. Unfortunately, I'll never make friends this way, and as my drives will undoubtedly shift again in the future to something more like last month, I really need to get on that so I have people to do stuff with when the time comes and I have conquered 6 novels, 15 episodes, and who knows how many Katamari stars.
But maybe if I take care of finding friends tonight, I'll be ok. That's it! I'll meet someone or sometwo tonight, right, and on the way home I'll get some kitty litter. And then my responsibilities will be out of the way, and I can sit alone in my apartment was much as I want! If the party is supposed to be fun, I won't want to go, but I'll just think of it as a chore that allows me afterwards to do everything I want to do! I'm such a genius, it's a shame my goal in life right now is to waste away all by myself because I could make such a great thinker.
UPDATE!
Since writing everything up there, I have taken an hour-long break for lunch where I sat in Bryant Park with my sushi and overheard three poorly-groomed young men enthusiastically discuss their latest joint session of World of Warcraft. From what I could tell, two of the boys played characters that were some variety of female homunculus. As they snorted and guffawed (this was the first time I had heard an actual guffaw, which I had previously thought a myth) their way through a retelling of some epic battle against the Archmagelords of Tuatha de Danan or something (I made that up), I felt my very brain chemistry changing. Maybe it was the unsettling gleam in their eyes. Maybe it was the occasional whiff of their intoxicating* musk. But suddenly video games and television don't sound so appealing anymore, and my mind has reawakened to the merits of making friends (though, I should add, in-person interaction) and learning something actually useful from a quality work of adult literature.
By the way, I have nothing against gamers. Really, some of my best friends are MMORPGers. But they also shower, leave the house, compose sentences not of the formula "[Magical battle move] was totally sweet", and do not trim their facial hair into weird shapes. There's a difference. You know the type I mean, so don't go getting all defensive.
* Emphasis on toxic.
I love you. Come back to me! Or pay for me to move there like NOW!
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