Blurring lines

The dog gets a dry nose when he’s not doing well. Common people get fever or feel odd when they’re not doing well, too. Me, I stop playing video games and almost every other activity that basically used to entertain me. Something is currently terribly wrong and I can’t exactly tell what it actually is.

It starts with the alarm clock in the morning and ends with the toothbrush in the evening. I feel totally uncomfortable with everything. Everything bothers me. Everything gets on my nerves. Everything bores me. Everything gives me enough arguments to hate it. I’m always tired, which is one of the reasons for everything previously mentioned. And I feel exhausted as well.

The thing that bothers me the most is the fact that I can’t locate the origin of this disease. It’s easy to say, “I’m don’t feel right because of, …”

That is the crux. If you ask me what is wrong, I wouldn’t be able to answer. One thing I could guess, the traveling each and every day. A couple of month ago I felt happy about the fact that there’s a period in my schedule that allows me to relax and come down and turn the switch. That’s a problem I suffer from for many years. When you’re into a job that includes activities that are also a part of your spare time activities, you barely have the chance to completely get rid of such things. The lines between job and hobby blur and finally lead to a stress factor that in reverse cause this kind of burn out.

I first noticed this issue almost a decade ago, where I agreed to make a long term test with a psychologist we had in my company back in the days. I ran through different written tests that were set on specific dates over a period of something like two month. I’m not certain how long the tests actually went.

After running through these tests and several conversations with our psychologists I received the result. Conclusion of all this was, I’ve got a serious problem with making a straight cut between work and spare time. The reasonable fact that my hobby does not really differ from the things I had to do at work increased the degree of my problem. I always suffered from burn out like symptoms in almost every job that stood in any relationship with IT.

To be honest, I considered changing my occupational field for years. The wish for a change repeats in time intervals tending to be quite shorter than the one before. In other words, I feel like I’ve reached a dead end street not sure for how long I can push myself to do what I currently do. On the other hand, this is the only thing I’ve learned. And my own comic book store or video game store, for instance, would lead to the same problem. A hobby turned into a job.

I’m so jealous about those people doing something for living that has nothing in common with things they use to do in their spare time. Meanwhile, I always feel terribly annoyed when someone asks me about computer related things or wants some help. Years ago, I was starving for opportunities like these. Nowadays I just feel bored to death. It’s only a handful of people receiving help. Seriously, my “talent” disgusts me and in the meantime a lot of people noticed this and my generic aversion. Without a doubt, my entity’s changed and my sodding work has a lot of proportion on that.

The Commuter

Another theory of mine what it could be, that bothers and puts me down. My current location. It’s not a problem with the location where I live, I feel depressed by the village I work at. When you’re a person who lives in bigger cities for quite major part of your life, you’re used to several conveniences the “big city” brings with. I literally work at the edge of an abandoned field, a duck pond in sight and utility poles on the horizon. No infrastructure around. And that’s the point.

It’s not that I’m the kind of a guy permanently being off office and enjoying an extended lunch break, but I’m the kind of guy who seems to get terribly disturbed by the fact, that his infrastructure he was used to is gone. Seriously, I hate the fact that even my way home wastes like one hour and a half and that I can no longer do some private business whenever I want, because I simply don’t have the opportunities right here. Meanwhile, I doubt that I’m a commuter. It sickens me. It’s fun for several weeks, but I can barely imagine doing this for years.

That kind of luxury I once had and which is currently lost seems to be part of my desolate condition I’m currently in. In these very few moments that I have to wander around in my hometown, I walk around with eyes wide open and my chops fall down. Like one of these village people that have a great experience to get when they “visit the city”. For f#$k’s sake. I bloody miss this, and it chokes my throat every morning where I leave my city by train. I’m a Sissy in this special case, but I seriously feel like handcuffed at the moment.

To get the facts straight, I got myself into this and sooner or later I’ll get rid of this. Currently I’m saying to myself that I have to get through this and take this as an experience. Maybe, just maybe, my mind and my attitude will change on this whole suspect. Maybe I should take a long vacation somewhere far away to recharge. Maybe I should ignore all this and live kind of sad into each new day, wearing a mask with a grin. Actually, a lot of people will get confused seeing me with a grin on my face. Most of this emotional baggage is a result of years living a luxurious way of live which does not depend on money.

Now, more than ever, I’m aware of the preciousness to have time. One or two hours can make such a big difference these days.

Driven by an unknown source

It’s been weeks now that I suffer from these weird depressions I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts. I actually do not understand where they come from and most importantly, why I’ve got them. The depression period is much longer than the previously mentioned weeks, a couple of month to be more exact. But it’s a couple of weeks now that I recognize them with more awareness.

Curiously, this is a condition that I’ve never experienced before and additionally did I never believe, that I could probably notice a depression without even knowing the cause. I’m a very cynical person and I also don’t give that much about mind related illnesses. According to this I find this current state even more hilarious. Also very frightening. It’s like standing right beside yourself without the possibility to actually reach yourself.

Basically it comes out of nowhere. A phase of deep sadness and loss of self-confidence. Like I said before, I don’t give much about those things and I also find people using therapy for mental illnesses simply waste money of our health care system. This loss of control about my emotional circumstances confuse me.

I’ve got several presumptions about this whole thing. One’s a job-wise one and the other one is a location-wise one. I also presume that the massive loss of spare time could be one reason, too. Another thing, I’m always tired and exhausted each and every time. I’ve got this weird lack of concentration and attention and I personally think that I failed on almost everything during the last few month.

My overall condition is far from good at the moment, but I’m aware of that and I personally do not think that this the reason for this melancholy driven sadness that affects me here and then. To be honest, I don’t have one sodding, important reason to be sad or depressed, but it affects me everyday and mostly in the worsts moments one can imagine.

This thing called… what did you say?

It’s been a while. After having almost a month of free time to waste on pure debauchery I’m finally back to the working class heroes with a regularly, fixed schedule. I feel much in my new company and I’m a thousand per cent certain that it was the right decision I’ve made. It’s a huge challenge, also a very interesting and intriguing challenge, but most importantly, no pack of Hyenas surrounding me bothering me with ideas and tasks of non-sense. Please understand that I’m not giving any further details on what I’m doing and so on, discretion is advised. Just feel informed with the fact that I like it where I’m at and I hopefully can be here for a while.

Once upon a time I had the will and lust to do some sports again but in the end I simply though “What the heck!

Well, I gained a massive amount of weight, especially on my free days, but I also have to admit that I’m not feeling very unwell. With this new job and the fact that I have to travel each day 120km I wanted to get a little bit more in comfort with ‘the new situation’ before starting this sporty thingy again. I also have to say, that I’m not in the mood to do any sports and I don’t want to force me to do anything I actually don’t want or like. Maybe my attitude on that is a completely different one tomorrow and I’m going to jog for like an hour.

Despite, I’d rather stick to gaming these days. I just started “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” and I’m also playing “Dead Island”. Both are great games in their genre BUT both are totally buggy or have several issues.

“Dead Island” is the game that has a lot of serious hardware related issues on my system. First of all, I use a 7.1 sound system on my gaming rig and I gain a lot of terrible, loud noises when I have the 7.1 speaker configuration turned on. I could fix by running in 5.1 mode only. The graphics are, let us say okay, but they stutter. This shouldn’t be an issue on my system due to the fact that the game runs at 180-200fps on maximum details at a resolution of 1920×1200. Hopefully they’ll fix this issue.

Another thing I don’t like, which is not hardware related, is the fact that you have a save point system and there’s no real indicator given when the game actually saves your progress. Terrible on a PC. Why no quick-save? Anyhow, the game itself looks promising and despite these issues I’ll continue playing and see what’s up next.

“Deus Ex: Human Revolution” is in my personal opinion the sequel the first “Deus Ex” deserved. It’s still far away from the class of it’s pre-predecessor, but it’s good and feels like “Deus Ex” and the developer does not go strictly mainstream as they were trying with “Deus Ex: Invisible War”, which was terrible game, if you ask me. I play “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” on highest difficulty level and I’m stuck at the first boss right now 😛 Anyhow, this game is definitely worth the play.

Time to waste

Changes, man, changes! I’ve got two days left at work and then I’ll enter a longer period of free time. Almost the whole August is free. I’ve got a job offer that I finally couldn’t resist in a company that captured my entire sympathy within a couple of moments and that looks very promising. My new life starts on 1st September. In the meantime I’ll try to use my free time to get a little bit more time with photography and learn my new lenses. On the other hand I plan to get back to sports. As mentioned before, I’ve got a lot of free time and want to use it as useful as I possibly can.

I gained several pounds during the last few weeks and I want to get rid of them as soon as I can. The answer is simple, lots of sports is the solution. I’m really excited about this, because I never had a training period like this before. It’s just me and my free time without getting distracted by work issues or everything else that might bother you in daily life. Right now, my weight is something around 108kg and I want to push it down to at least 100kg. I personally think that this is possible within four weeks and a half.

Besides this stands my second ego, the gamer. I’ve got so many games that I haven’t already that deserve a play through that I’ll jump on these, too. My fave at the moment is the absolutely brilliant “DiRT 3”. One of the best racing games for years and as addictive as the all time classic “Colin McRae Rally 2.0”

“Colin McRae Rally 2.0” sucked hours and hours of my weekends and free time and there wasn’t a single moment where I got bored. “DiRT 3” is actually the same, very motivating and entertaining for every single moment. The only thing that bothers me a little are the DLCs. I bought Monte Carlo and Japan, but they could have made into the final retail game, too. These two DLCs cost me around 15 Euros and you have to keep in your mind, that you can get a great budget title for that money, too. Hopefully, this rip off will have an end in the near future.

Finally, and I hope the weather god is good to me. I’ll go out in my town and probably Berlin and do some photos. I’ve got this new fish eye lens that deserves a little more attention. Anyhow, I wanted to go out for pictures for such a long time, but I felt really exhausted and stressed by nearly everything over the last few weeks that I actually haven’t found the time and intention to do so.

Whatever the case, a new job starts on September and I’ve got a lot of free time in the meantime. I’ll try to use it to recharge and to get back into shape. I’ll keep you informed.

The games, the jobs, the moves

Haven’t wrote a while for quite some reasons. First of all nothing special actually happened. Secondly, too much happened that I haven’t found time for writing.

For those of you interested in my impressions according several games I have to apologize, I seriously have such a lack of time over last days that there wasn’t any gaming worth writing about. I can tell you that I played a lot DiRT 3 and I started playing Crysis 2, since the release of patch 1.9, including DX11 and HiRes textures and all this kind of stuff. These are AAA titles and I’m still not sure if I should write about games that get reviewed on every other single website.

I also started playing Duke Nukem Forever and all I can say till now, it’s a giant disappointment. I will, yes, I promise, I will give an impressions review on this particular title because the Duke is a phenomenon that simply deserves a review or just a gaming field report.

Another important thing that was going on, I’m still stuck between enemy lines. I’ve recently got an offer for a company that looks pretty promising according that point potential and development. As far as I know, it’s a network infrastructure that is pretty basic right now, that wants to grow to something, I actually do not know. Anyhow, it should get bigger and better and I shall be the man for it.

On the other side, there’s this job in this advanced technical college that wasn’t approved till now, but I also was not rejected till now. It’s another job that is very promising, also differs from what I’m doing at the moment and simply interests me very much. It’s more an operator job in some multimedia stuff, things I’ve recently done a lot, because I did some internet streaming and had to do some video editing, too (even though I hate this creative things).

The third candidate is my current company. It’s for sure that I’m not leaving without asking for a price to keep me in. And you can bet your mother that I’m going to be expensive, I mean, reeeaally expensive. I’ve taught myself so much during the last 5-6 years and I got skills in so many different areas that I want to get paid for this and receive the graditute I deserve. I decided to stay in my company, if none of the current opportunities fits my requirements in any way. I waited for such a long time to get a new job opportunity, I still have some breath left to wait a little bit more in the case that nothing gets rolling.

That’s the status for now. Plan for the weekend is to help out on a move of some friends of mine. I’m not uber excited about that, but hey, sometimes you help friends, you know?

Quickie

Here’s just a short update of what has happened in during the last days since my last blog post. To be honest, nothing really special happened. It’s FIFA World Cup in South Africa and I try to watch as many matches as I can, even at work. I was so pissed with my old tube TV that I had to bye me a new 40″ flat LED TV screen and I also signed a new contract with my cable provider to get as much HD as possible.

Another thing that pisses me off for a while is my job. It bores me on the one hand and it stresses me incredibly much that I can barely concentrate on anything on the other hand. Actually it feels like a burnout syndrome but I’ll wait till the last day of my upcoming vacation in France if this feel is still present. If it’s so I’ll look around for a new job.

Straight edge is running well at the moment except one thing, my addiction for ice. From today on rule #6 which says “Say no to chocolate and candy! Subsist yourself healthy!” will change to “Say no to chocolate, sweets, ice, cake and candy! Subsist yourself healthy!”

I had to make this change because I personally think that my nutrition wasn’t that healthy as it should have been in last 2-3 weeks and there were too much of this sweet thing crap. Maybe with “Straight Edge 2.0” I’ll introduce something like a “day off”-rule to get more control into flexibility and wanted rule breaks. But I have to think about this rule.

Tonight is the night where I am going to see AC/DC in concert again. I’ve seen them last year in Leipzig in the Central Stadium and now I am going to see them in Berlin’s Olympiastadion which will be a great and amazing scenery for a rock concert of this size. For those about to rock, we salute you…