Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Ignore everything 2

Ignore my previous interest in the www.everything2.com site. After messing with it more, I’ve found great shortcomings in using it as a reference tool. It does, however, make a great popularity contest if you miss the days of high school. Sigh.

I feel largely functional today, with almost all of the wheezing gone. The other night, the blinds in my bedroom fell down and I had no way to re-fasten them. I live on the first floor, so this was a problem. I ended up duct-taping a sheet across the window so I could go to sleep. I got that whole nightmare fixed last night. And I’m almost caught up on sleep, so maybe I’ll get something productive done in the next few days.

I’ve been in a strange situation as far as trying to figure out what to do next in life. I realize I always say this, but don’t explain it. I also realize that I make it sound like I’m going to quit my job tomorrow and go join the circus or the Marines or something. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that there’s a lot of slop in my life now, a lot of emptiness. I feel this inside of me, but it’s also in my schedule, my activities. I go to work, I come home, and there’s nothing but an answering machine with zero messages and a book that I couldn’t possibly work on for ten hours straight every night. I don’t want to watch TV, and I don’t have cable, and I don’t really feel like going anywhere. So what do I do? When I had a girlfriend, I had an excuse, a person to call or see or whatever. And I realize I was not the best boyfriend in the world and I didn’t entertain her with tons of neat, new activities on a constant basis. So what am I supposed to do? If I was religious, I’d go to church, but I’m not. And I’ve thought about volunteering but I have severe social anxiety problems related to this. I could start other projects, program computers, start a zine, something like that. But the bottom line is, I need to find a way to fill my time that will eventually help me feel better about things and give me room to grow.

I guess in the past, I would jump right into another relationship, and the fastest way to do that is to get into a dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want to do that, but I also don’t want to shun away from the opposite sex entirely for a mandated sentence until I get “better.” I wish I could just hang out with more people, experience things, do things. I don’t know, I’m babbling. But I feel a need to write, and to explain.

Everything2 really bothered me. It’s like IRC or any other BBS in that there’s a group of popular, trendy people, just like in high school. And if you’re not for them, you’re against them. People were voting down my stuff just because I wasn’t writing stupid new nodes that were chatty and useless. I can’t really deal with stuff like that. Everything2 is a good idea in theory, but it’s nothing more than a glorified chat server for a bunch of airheads.

I don’t know if I want to stay and work until the trains calm down, or go get a drink somewhere and edit the book, or just mess around for a while. I guess I’m going to go find out.