I broke up with World of Warcraft yesterday

I can't believe that I wrote a blog entry about the bottle-throwing and I forgot the single most important development of my life over the weekend: I canceled my Warcraft account. I finally grew some stones and broke up with that game. We did an instance run yesterday that took almost 5 hours, and at the end of that five hours we had accomplished nothing, and I was actually sobbing from frustration. The other people in my party didn't want me to leave because, even though we were all dying every ten minutes, without a healer we would have all been dying every three minutes. And my home computer has recently, suddenly, inexplicably, begun to suck--refusing to load things quickly, or sometimes, at all. Damned compy! And so the animation in the game was so choppy I was getting all headachy and nauseated, at four frames per second (if that means anything to you). And I had this revelation: it was Sunday evening, and I had done nothing all day, and I felt sick and sad and tired, and I felt like that because of something that I supposedly enjoy and, for that matter, actually pay money to do. And that, internets friends, does not make sense.

It's not like I'll never, ever play again. Sometimes relationships end, and a few months go by, and then you realize you've found enough peace that going back to spending one night a week together won't ruin your life... and might even be kind of satisfying. (Heh.) And if that happens, great. But otherwise, I am now awaiting my next weird, dorky obsession, so if anyone has any suggestions...

Oh, so, as an end to the story, after I broke up with Warcraft (and canceled my account), and in the few Sunday evening hours remaining to me, I did all my dishes, two loads of laundry, made some food, went for a walk with James to the Legislature and stuck my feet in the fountain, and read a book. I was EXTREMELY productive. We full-time-job having people have to be judicious with our spare time.

Here is a picture I took on our walk. I like how super-real (or, as we say in the photography business, "vivid") it looks. I said to James, "it's so beautiful... it looks almost American. Like we were a society that really cared about democracy." (Which is patently ridiculous. How could a society care about democracy, if they don't constantly use it as rhetoric to support every political action they make? Exactly. They can't. And don't.)

At work, working,
Jocelyn

Earlier entry, on the subject of breaking up with things that are not people: Dear Edmonton...