For some reason lately I’ve been missing the college environment more and more.
The feeling of always having someone around… having someone to sit in the same room with at night doing random things separately (like homework or games)… having someone nearby you can go bother when you’re bored…

Lately I’ve been feeling incredibly lonely. Somehow, it’s not the same having people visit on weekends. There’s no one around in the evening. There’s no one around in the mornings. There’s no comforting sounds of someone else in the shower before class or of someone else tapping away at their keyboard after dinner.

When David was visiting and we made dinner and ate it together and then sat around afterward drawing or sewing, respectively… When Greg was visiting and we sat around at night doing things separately on our computers… Back in college when Keith would play old video games as I sat around playing KoL… Ian would do Ian-things on his computer while I worked on cards…
Things like that are comforting… if just to know that you’re not all by yourself… to be able to look over and see another human.

Failing that… being able to walk up a couple floors to see people and just sit with them watching TV or doing homework… being able to walk 10 minutes to the cluster where you can be surrounded by people you know… being able to head over to one of any number of buildings where there’s always people you know…

I don’t know. I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect to have people around in the same way as in college since post-college life is 9-5 job followed by going home and sleep whereas college is 24-hour-a-day job interspersed with fun with people and sleep at certain intervals. Still, I somehow feel completely wrong in this environment.

Ugh.

I just need to be around people. I don’t care who. I just need someone in a way that’s more than just seeing people at work or having people over for random short periods on weekends.

Rant rant rant I’m so stupid wtf is wrong with me.

I’ve been feeling rather off lately and I’m not sure why. I guess it’s a combination of lonely, bored, and frustrated.

I want to work on cards, but given that no one is interested in playing or anything, I usually end up not finding the motivation. Student Wars v2 needs some rebalancing since the latest testing confirms that GPA is underpowered and RPG Get! needs card making… but meh.

My other computer is still borked and I don’t really feel like fixing it (especially since that would likely involve a reformat and such).

Haven’t been interested in food at all lately. I eat when I have to because eating is good, but it seems to be more out of necessity than actual desire. There’s some interesting places that will deliver pre-made awesome meals (such as this one) of food that I actually am interested in eating… except the cost is way too high. (Over $40/day for 3 meals? One dinner meal of fish with a side costs $20? No thanks.) There’s also random take-out places that I’ll sometimes be in the mood for, but eating out every day at $10/meal (even just once a day) is a bad plan.

Work is going well and is enjoyable, but I really should have a life other than work and PSO.

I want to shoot photos but there’s no one to shoot portraits of and shooting not-people is only fun with someone else.

Relationships are funny. I guess it feels so normal at this point that there’s part of me that is interested in being single again just for the hell of being single. It’s not that I’m at all unhappy or feeling trapped or anything… just that I feel like maybe such a huge change (in my mind) would at least be *something* happening in my routine of work, sleep, work, sleep, games, sleep, work, sleep. There’s also the fact that I often take words at more than face value. I don’t know.

I suppose life is good, and I’m not unhappy, persay. I’m just feeling off.

Well, so my personal laptop appears to be fairly junked at this point. The battery now has 0% capacity (more likely something broke in the hardware such that the battery no longer supplies power, given that it still had plenty of battery power as recently as early July) so pulling the plug on it is a hard power off.
Besides that, it currently is unable to access the internet (through either a wired connection or the built-in wireless), is massively prone to overheating (and will hard power off when it does so) even when raised up on cups to let air circulate, and will often hard power off for no apparent reason (not due to overheating). Also, yes, the fan is working… it’s loud as hell and also comes on at random times when the computer isn’t doing anything.

All that and the laptop is only about 2 years old. Meh.

Don’t ever buy HP… they’re reasonably cheap and aesthetically pleasing, but they’re crap.

They also don’t come with install disks but instead a recovery partition… so you can either clean install from your own OS disk and lose all the applications (and have to manually find drivers online–the main reason I didn’t just install Ubuntu on it when I first got it) or use the partition to restore to factory specs (no other option). Also the preinstalled OS is horribly bloated with HP junk so restoring to factory specs isn’t going to give you the clean install you want.

I really should buy a desktop computer soon to replace this (the Inspiron 530 looks interesting) so I have something to use besides my work computer. I’m tempted to wipe it and install Ubuntu if/when I get it… and use VMWare or similar to run Windows XP in it for Photoshop and stuff (because wine seems like a huge pain to get working right). Someone who’s used VMWare before: How exactly does it work? Do I install it and then tell it to install XP from a disk I have or something?

But meh, I feel bad spending money on a new computer no matter how much I may need/want it. (Sticker shock, I suppose… not used to spending large amounts of money at once.) I feel like I get more stingy with each passing day.

My 38 pounds of cards (shipping in two boxes) will get here next Friday.

Ugggghhh I want them now.
I want to tear open the plastic shrink wrap and smell the delicious new card smell and carefully tear open booster after booster after booster and spread them out and admire them and put them into piles by rarity and type and put them into binders where I can look at them and ahhhh.

I swear I’m not addicted >_>

My apartment is empty for the first time in weeks. After David left, Em’s mom came for a visit followed the next day by Greg. Also, this weekend, Jim crashed on our couch when he came to visit SF.
I’m feeling remarkably lonely now.

My computer still isn’t working, so email is still the worst way to reach me. If it’s something important, please please send me an IM instead.

As far as entertainment, I’ve been doing a lot more sewing lately (the old-fashioned way, with a needle, thread, and a lot of patience). I bought some stuffing last week so I could finally stuff the cubes and stars. In addition to the cubes and stars I sewed while David was here, I also made a cloud, another couple stars, a couple rectangular prisms, and a couple triangular pyramids.

Greg with cloud and stars.

Greg with bigstar.

Jim with angrystar.

Cube, big prism, little prism, big pyramid, and little pyramid.

I guess you can’t see the mouths on the stars too well. All of the stars except the smallest one have mouths (the angrystar has a frowny mouth, the others have smiley mouths).

I need to sew cube a little sibling at some point. Geometric shapes are fun. Any suggestions for other shapes I should make (besides annoying things like dodecahedrons)?