Cautiously optimistically hoping the asthma flare is about over. o_o Woke up breathing normally for the first time in at least 2 weeks or longer. ... Well, maybe not. Sorta still coughing.
I've been saying this is my worst allergy year since 2010, but this week screamed past that and left it behind in the dust, so 2016 is now officially my worst. This is the kind of week where my anxiety should be kicking in like crazy, but I'm getting through it GREAT. Well, comparatively speaking. I haven't run in to town to be around people in case I die, worst case scenario kind of stuff. I haven't even paced my floor very much at all. I've mostly just glued myself to minecraft, which was amazing for taking my mind off time passing and all the sensations irking my nervous system, very soothing, considering I've been in and out of asthma flare since probably sometime in March, because I thought the cough was something else for awhile. Think what you will, but being stuck home alone for 12 hours a day with a medical situation with no one around on your road to call in case there's trubba tends to lend to more anxiety than you'd think, even for a recluse like me.
And the best part of yesterday was getting Kai to myself for a few hours. That doesn't happen very often for various reasons in both our lives, but when it does, I can so thoroughly immerse into minecraft that I don't even think about anything else bothering me, which is pretty monumental when your nervous system is in 250% overload.
I've never yet built a big structure or a real house in minecraft. Usually that's one of the first things most people do, go build something. All my houses are like tiny huts or bunkers, not even on par with a nice cottage. I've got base camps deep in mine shafts and scattered across landscapes on several worlds, but no real house or building. I've been noticing how the way I play minecraft reflects the roots of who I am. I have lived in a nice house for 23 years that @bonenado designed and built, and even though I was supposed to have some input, didn't really get what I wanted beyond bare specs that got readjusted for this reason or that. I felt for a long time like this wasn't even my house, since my stepdaughter and mother-in-law kept reminding me it wasn't. I haven't been free to decorate to my own taste, which I've mentioned, which has been more than ironic since I'm living in a neighborhood full of retirees with money who seem to get to relish what they want in life.
And it started way before that. I was in the 9th grade when we moved to Missouri to a big acreage with an old house only heated by a woodstove, very campy in every sense. Real Things You Might Not Know About Me My brother slept on a screened in porch on a cot most of the time. After graduating, I traveled the summer and then came back to my parents having moved to another big acreage and a completely different house without even telling me (WHO DOES THAT???) and I wound up sleeping on a floor for 6 months until I finally got a bed. When I got married a year later, I wound up living out of a car for a week and a skanky hotel room for a month, and one horrible used trailer after another. I finally got my own apartment after I divorced and scraped some student loans together to escape being back at my parents' crap house, which had been converted from a machine shop.
My life from birth to 8th grade never once indicated I'd live like that. We started pretty well off. My mom had upper middle class relatives sprinkled around here and there. Her marriage to dad was snubbed as a step down, but she couldn't resist a cowboy on a motorcycle who dreamed of owning his own ranch. My view of materialism is a unique blend of tasteful elegance (gold silverware and table etiquette) and bunkhouse simplicity and functionality.
So getting into minecraft and seeing people build what they wish they had (I'm assuming) has only triggered a lot of tangled and somewhat painful memories for me. If I do any kind of real building in minecraft, it's certainly not going to be typical. I've been thinking about what kind of building I want for months while I stay busy doing other things.
On April 9th I accidentally cross loaded my multiplayer ID onto singleplayer and wiped my hostile mobs right out of existence on chicken world. Life there instantly became boring. I was there to experiment with moats and had just about figured out the weird physics of trapping mobs in water flow. Well, without the mobs to experiment on, that only turned out to be a drag.
So what do I do? Start running. I had worked so hard setting up in this world, the least I can do is run around and go see it. Found a village on the plains, obviously bombed up a bit in the night by creepers but still thriving with gardens and animals and villagers. Stuff like that really makes a person think about quantum observation- does the game play itself even if I never see it? Does it create and spawn chunks as I come near? Mobs seem to spawn because of my presence, but they had already hit this village and I wasn't even there. Well, problemo solved since I cross loaded. I amused myself for an hour in the village and then took off running again.
And then that translated to multiplayer, where I'd already played around with tree farming and plowing beaches for glass manufacturing, made highways in deep cracked caverns like I was a dwarf. I just wanted to run. I thought OK, if I find a cool place to set down my own roots and actually build a house or something, let's see what comes out of my head.
Years ago during an attempt at a masters in guidance and counseling, my house-tree-person house was a 2D floor plan, and I guess I was the first person in 30 years that the teacher (a child psyche professional) had ever seen do that. No one knew how to analyze it, so I self analyzed it to mean I wasn't hiding a thing, you get to see the guts of my thinking and I'll even detail it for you like a blueprint, but I was obviously missing emotional depth and indicators of any kind to interpersonal connections in my life (the house drawing generally indicates one's relationship to a mother figure, which barely existed for me). When put together with my tree (a very pointy Christmas tree full of baubles and chopped off from the roots, many signs of anger and disconnection from my father) and my person (a cartoon me in a bikini doing a circus act on a horse with a big smile and my eyes shut, a pretty vivid indication of splatting myself all over people without truly sharing myself), yeah, my childhood was a mess. Along with other tests we had to practice doing and analyzing, I pretty much hit schizophrenia on the head, but my MMPI and a personal interview nixed that one, the teacher saying my anger issues, exhibitionism, and wildly different ways of doing things only seemed to hide that I actually have a stable personality and an emotionally healthy way of dealing with stuff. That was about a year or two before the word Asperger's ripped around the world. They had no word for me yet. I realized by the second semester in that I would hate being a professional counselor (many of the ones I've met say I'd be a really good one and have tried to push me back into the field), and switched to a masters in resource planning. After my sociology/anthropology degree, I took to geology and geographical statistical analysis and NEPA laws like a duck. And then you throw in several jobs I've had, like retail, and next thing you know, I'm in minecraft multiplayer helping other retailers play store.
Is it any wonder people love minecraft? I can only wonder if psyche analysis will start extending to what players create and do instead of just people whining about their kids or SOs being addicted to gaming. Minecraft is the most house-tree-person thing I've ever seen. I can run through other people's buildings and basically typecast their emotional lives. I've been professionally trained.
So yeah. Me finally making a commitment to building a real thing on minecraft is kind of a big deal. The real me is going to come out. The most surprising part, for me, was once I found the spot I like (didn't have to run very far), I immediately told Kai. I knew sharing would be too exciting to control, and sure enough, I had to relog over some serious lag issues and found Kai already all over an idea I'd mentioned without me even being there. That is a huge step for me. I have trust issues galore. If I'd truly wanted to think of my building as mine, I'd never have shared my ideas in the first place. I am gloriously reclusive in my wild exhibitionism. I love hiding and springing forth. (If I were a cat, I'd be the most annoying pet you have.) Ever since kindergarten my life is rife with "Does not play well with others", and jobs only confirmed "Does not work well with others", and while none of my blurting and doing is because of animosity, I do disdain and bypass the human connections one must make first, like saying Hello, how was your day? I bounce all over people like SpongeBob, then disembowel them verbally like Spock without a single thought to how my opinion might make someone feel. Thankfully, the relog was quick and the repercussion of Kai's enthusiasm was mild, and cool stuff happened. I doubt anything this cool would have come out of blending my head with anyone else.
I'm not going to spoil yet, but I can already tell you this is NOT going to be a typical house. We've got a sky island like Avatar, for one thing, so bridging a skyway over to it and extending it was inevitable. And then Kai had run off exploring and had me come see a witch's hut in a swamp (those are cool), and was going to show me the way back, but we both got killed at the same time and then got turned around, but it was all fortuitous because we found inspiration. If you've never ridden down a waterfall on minecraft, you've gotta try it, especially if you find one this big.
As you can imagine, taking that idea home to the sky island was instant fun. This is the short vid of our new waterslide. Kai originally started it way higher but the water kept freezing up.
~later~
We've got a Bunny spending tonight, so went out and picked up some tiny ice creams and baby bananas and other fun munchies, and a kite.
Despite my years of analytical training in several fields, it took fandoms to plug me in emotionally.
Those emotional connections are so important.
The key to a fandom sometimes hangs on that connection. I want to turn that key and change the world.
My name is Pinky, and this is my Haus
Let's find out what kind of house is locked up in my head...
Psychoanalyze Yourself survey
