I never thought I’d be here and now, over there and far away; never figured I’d make it to this time, but who does? It’s still strange to say the word “wife”, to say the word “forever”, to think that battlefields are in my backyard and the moss is often soft enough to sleep upon. My crushes are now my colleagues and there are cats strewn every-which-way as I walk from room to room between brain breaks on old floorboards that squeak with each step. My will has real names on it; my thinking becomes more open and rigid all at the same time. My patterns have gone plaid. These long-germinating dreams, all rooted in fantasies and adventures and tiny, tiny handwriting in all capital letters made it this way. It wasn’t her nor him, but how not to be a drain, or be a pain, but to be true past the end. My chemicals are mixed up and sometimes it’s insufferable, but I paint it out and it leaves me like a miasmic exhale as the cavalcade of colors connects all those synapses and cradles me in its huemanity. So I don’t talk about it much.

Tomorrow I will be different, but still a baby, still a beginner, still a novice. The things I say are pointed and polemical and I cringe in the mirror sometimes as the lines get thicker and the colors slowly, infinitesimally fade away, my greatest ungrounding and undoing. There is still so much room for being bigger and better and brighter, and I’m so sincerely very sorry to have not been more of what my potential had proposed, and for all of the other times I have disappointed. I am especially sorry for those. But somehow I am still loved by exactly the right people, and I have given much of that which I have promised and I have no regrets (yet) and hope never to have so. The fear of death should grow as the shadows go long and this is what I most find amusing; that sickness and goodbyes are assured but I am less terrified now because every day I think that if I were to go long tomorrow I would still be the luckiest whatever that ever rolled a handful of those pretty polyhedrals.

This eve, just before the moment of my half-life, I am the same as I will be tomorrow, but young. Tomorrow I will be the same and old, and will probably act the same but younger, I warn you of this. I will not kick and scream while crossing that divide, but I will indeed tease and play and titter, and may ask you to come along for a little while, and if I do not, I hope that you will remind me to. Nothing has really changed.

There was certainly a point not so very long ago at which I equated my time occupied with external responsibilities to my very relevance in the world of adulthood, independence, and competency. It was a period of proving, simultaneously to parents, peers, and self. I’m not quite sure how long it lasted, or how much of it still exists. But consciously, both then and now, expressing my high level of commitment to the many tasks and projects to which I’ve subscribed has never been intended to be a boast nor a complaint. I like being busy because I have great amounts of enthusiasm and the energy to spread around to numerous different processes. I love multi-tasking and building, organizing and learning. I make list of things to do and then lists of those lists. I fall to pieces with joy every time I walk into The Container Store. And I love helping others and the feeling of coming through on the things I have promised, no matter who the recipient. I am indeed addicted to creating.

In the Internet-(mal)nourished, short-attention-span world we now live in, it’s incredibly easy to over-engage and overcommit. On an individual basis, our reach is now seemingly limitless, our abilities omnipotent, our impact global. This universal empowerment has most certainly incited a measure of universal competition: to write, to work, to make. Every voice is Divine Right; every opinion counts – or, strangely, is expected to. It’s no wonder that everyone proudly touts their commitments and responsibilities. Busy is important. Busy is popular. Busy is purpose, even though, as the columnist states, that’s all a lie. “Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.”

Me, I am eager to share the things with which I’m busy, and I comprehensively enjoy hearing about yours, even if I don’t always fully grasp the magnitude or the impact of them on your life. And if you catch me begging off real communication on the account of general, nebulous busyness, feel free to call me on my shit. I’m listening.

Even if proudly being busy is a foible or worse, does it always have to be a cover-up? Must it by nature be an impediment? And to what – isn’t engaging with experiences the very qualifier of a life well-lived?  To take this a bit farther, even but a moment musing on motivation belies Kreider’s thesis: sequestering works for him, because he is a writer who needs sequestering to be productive. Me, I need to be behind the counter helping three customers at the same time. I like to feel the pressure of academic deadlines and crafting presentations and reviewing books. I thrive on doing a hundred things at once, and my days feel productive only when I’ve skimmed the edges of a wide array of tasks, senses, and interests. Days off don’t exist, because days off are not fun for me. I want breadth much more than I require depth.

My perfect cocktail is a healthy shot of accomplishment in a stiff glass of initiative. What’s most important to me is balancing work and play a little bit every day, especially as play was often frowned upon while growing up. So I bought a game store, and I’ve worked my ass off there for two decades, while playing and helping others play. My university career was woven in and around this, all at the same time. It’s clear now: I need to be busy. I thrive when I’m busy.

If there is something at all that is getting covered up with all this…living, it’s the fact that, with forty years approaching in my headlights, I am indeed squarely in the throes of my own mid-life crisis: the realization that there just isn’t enough time to do all of the amazing things I enjoy doing. Quite simply, there are just too many things that I enjoy, and that is my curse. That’s what I’m hiding behind my busyness.

There are too many games to play; too many books to read; too many songs to hear; too many cities to visit; too many friends to make; too many words to learn; too many miniatures to paint; too many colors to feel; too many foods to try; and never enough warm smiles from my wife, no matter how much time there is or ever could be, in this life and every.

Not a curse, but a blessing.

• I no longer have a normal workday, which is quite odd for a routine-based bull. I’ve been staying up very late and waking up very late, which will need to change before the end of the month or I won’t see sunlight this winter. Projects are many and all over the place, and I currently manage them by making many-tiered lists and jumping from one to another willy-nilly. When I’ve had enough, I shut down the output but remain open to input from other sources that demand more output. So there’s always some reserve attention and action in the tank. It’s a very different way of doing things from what I’ve done, but it’s flowing along, though perhaps not as efficiently as I’d like. As I’m winding down from my day, the store is just spooling up, which means I usually work at grasping a second wind. It’s not too much to handle, but there are many different hats worn on a given day. My hair sometimes gets mussed.

• This also means that I don’t recognize a normal weekend. It’s sort of like being permanently on-call, which I don’t mind, as I get to make my own working hours on a day-to-day basis. My time management and discipline skills are underdeveloped, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever make the time to work on them. Case in point. But I don’t feel locked into work, neither mundane nor academic, and I’m making absolutely sure that I still have time for creative projects, which I am viewing as essential this time around.

• Currently making my first “professional” website, this one for the Scottish Society for Northern Studies. We’re launching near the end of November, just in time for their 2012 AGM. Almost finished with the first draft, and looking forward to getting this up and going. I’m really very thankful for the development tools provided by Rapidweaver and Stacks, which boast an amazingly generous and creative community of developers that help sub-designers like myself keep producing work without any formal coding training. Since I’ve been in Scotland, I’ve made robust sites for my business and personal use, two for my academic program (still in progress), and now the SSNS as a paid project. I’m learning quite a bit and really enjoying the process. Very thankful, especially to folks like Ryan Smith, Joe Workman, and Marten Claridge.

• Also on the design front, I’ve been making a number of Gamescape-related items, including drafts of new T-shirts and VIP-style laminates for our employees to wear. I’m very happy with the branding of the store and where it’s gone since we revamped in in 2006. A big chunk of this is due to Evan’s wonderful re-imagining of our logo, of course; he’s amazing. From this base since then, I’ve been creating a whole line of promotional documents, media, and online elements to carry the brand forward, and the whole thing has been a great experience and has given me a real education in the process. And it’s some pretty solid, memorable branding that I believe works well for the store.

• OMG Assassin’s Creed 2. Late nights on this spent in Renaissance Italy, climbing things and evading guards and learning about one of my favorite eras through a really gorgeous, well-put-together video game. At the end of the month, AC3 comes out, which is set against the backdrop of the American Revolution. Those of you who know me will also know that’s when I lose my shit. CANNOT WAIT.

• New iMacs should finally be out next week, and my 2006 desktop MacPro is just about to give up the ghost. I don’t currently have the funds for a new behemoth tower, and the new ones won’t be coming out until next year, so on to the next best thing. Really looking forward to having a functioning desktop again. Now if only Apple would get rid of that horrid, distracting chin on the things!

• One of the joys of my autumn has been a subscription to NFL’s Game Pass, which lets me stream every live or recorded game on-demand, on my own time, in HD straight to our big-screen. Heck, even fans Stateside can’t get a deal that good. It keeps me properly Americanized and brings back the thrill of Sundays in the fall. And the 49ers aren’t doing so poorly now, are they? Now we just need Boxing to get with the program, though it will never happen.

• Really, really excited about a few of the new miniatures games popping up recently. Of special note are Bolt Action, Black Powder, Pike & Shotte, SAGA, and Muskets & Tomahawks. I’ve got copies of each coming from the store, and part of my evening regimen involves working out the details of a miniature recreation of the Jacobite action at Inverurie 1745. I’ve recently gotten some gorgeous pieces from Front Rank, who are making the very best and most complete line of Jacobite figures to date, and have been getting them cleaned up for painting. Warlord is also doing a decent job of releasing a ton of material for the 17th century, including some great personalities from the Thirty Years’ War and Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The fact that the former is my supervisor’s field of expertise is a wonderful coincidence, and I’ve got an effigy of Alex Leslie that’s currently in-progress for him.

• I’ve been listening to all things Johnny Jewel nearly nonstop for weeks. Anything he touches turns to gold. Mastermind of Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire, and countless other projects besides, there’s a ton of free music to be streamed and downloaded on his SoundCloud. Do yourself a favor this winter and slip into something nice and comfy.

• And the point of why I’m here – that little Jacobite database thingy – continues apace. I’ve probably got around two-thousand names currently entered, including all corresponding post-conflict information about them, but there are oodles still to come. The database architecture itself will be commenced this winter and then we’ll be able to begin compiling and collating all of the juicy prosopographic information within. Also by the end of the year, I’ll be submitting my formal proposal to attend next year’s JST conference in Paris, which will be the first time my project will be brought to the attention of the wider discipline.

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Learninglearningalwayslearning.

Digital-life curation/admin:

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Current crash-courses in:

jQuery, Digital Humanities, Black Powder, oil & enamel washes.

I might use lists differently than other folks, as I tend to compile them and recompile them in a very meta-taxonomical manner. So, then, even my lists have lists. Not unlike, I might add, the part of my research that transcribes lists from the 1930s that were compiled from lists in the 1890s, originally taken from manuscript lists in the mid-18th century. Thank the gods I’ve married a librarian.

The one problem with the unholy pairing of list-making and just a little bit of OCD is that until those little bastards are checked off, each one irritates me like a piece of sand in my mollusk, and sometimes I can take that action-haunting out on others around me. But really, all I want is for those folks to regard lists like I do, and attend to them in the same way. That is surely an impossibility, and I need to get over it. We all deal with our lists in our own ways. Or sometimes not at all.

Here is my list for today, compiled from many others that span a number of different responsibilities which I am currently undertaking. It’s not an odd list, but there are some odd entries, I suppose, if taken out of context. My favorite is “Answer George Bush re: Culloden Swords”. Surely we all have something like that on our respective lists. Please tell me that’s true?

Anything of note on your list for today?