Did I confuse you with the extracts from my diary? I’m so terribly sorry.

This past weekend I was at DunDraCon XIX in San Ramon, California. Unlike Dragon*Con, which Jennifer and I went to back in September (a week before It happened), DunDraCon is focused entirely on role-playing games. I started going regularly two years ago to be help market and playtest The Outer Darkness with Evilpheemy. That first time, I wasn’t able to actually play in any role-playing game sessions, because I actually had work to do (it really was quite annoying: I had my laptop computer with me and had to spend too much time logged in from my hotel room), and because my shoulder was in a lot of pain; last year I was sick, and spent much of the time in our hotel room covered with gross hives and sneezing my brains out. This year, though, I finally got to play in some actual games. Not only did I get to play in several board games and card games (my favorite is still Give Me the Brain! by Cheap Ass Games), but I got to play in some actual role-playing games as well. The Delta Green game that I played in was all right, but the Call of Cthulhu game that Evilpheemy ran was outstanding.

In August, Evilpheemy and his wife will be heading out to Wisconsin to attend GenCon to market The Outer Darkness and network out there. In September, I’m off to WorldCon in San Jose to make my own contribution. In truth, I actually prefer conventions that aren’t entirely devoted to role-playing games. I like a variety of panels and events. At science fiction conventions, you’ll meet artists and writers (at least two of my favorite writers, David Brin and Tad Williams, will be at WorldCon) as well as actors and even musicians. There were late night concerts at Dragon*Con, and those were fun. Jennifer and I probably won’t be going to Dragon*Con this year, but I think that WorldCon will be just as fun.

And I had a strange revelation while I was at DunDraCon. It was sparked by Evilpheemy, who has already been the source of at least one piece of major, life-changing advice in my own life (he spoke seven words to me a couple of years ago, which ultimately resulted in my marriage to Jennifer and many of the wonderful things that have happened along with that — I can’t reveal those seven words here, but chances are that if you need to know them, you already do). And it was sparked by something that happened while I was driving down to the con on Saturday morning.

Evilpheemy had read my last self-pity post last week, and called me on my cell phone while I was working at the lab, and make a career suggestion for me, one that made a lot of sense. More on it at some point in the future. He mentioned to me that he had been following my career "lamentations" for quite some time on line, and that sparked a chain of thought in my mind which culminated with me realizing, on Saturday morning, the following:

That in the past ten years, at least, I probably haven’t spent more than a single day obsessing over the issue.

That can’t be healthy… Can it?

Well, certainly, it’s important to consider your contributions to the world, how you’re going to live your life, what you want to contribute to make the world a better place. But I realized I’ve let this obsession of mine get to the point, at times, where, ironically, I couldn’t work… because I was too busy worrying about how I was going to work, and what I was going to do. And that’s just nuts.

The worst part of it, though, was when I realized that I’d also thought a couple of times to myself, "Well, if nothing else, my life insurance will pay for the house, so Jennifer will be fine…" And that’s when I really decided that I needed to make a change.

"Hi. I’m Richard C., and I’m a thoughtaholic."

So, maybe I should just kind of quit whining now. Quit obsessing over it. Quit focusing on what I’m going to be when I grow up, and focus instead on just living my life: staying open to new ideas and new experiences, seeing what comes along, and trying out new things and taking joy in learning new things. Perhaps I can spend less time being angry about how things aren’t turning out the way I think that they should be, and having fun in seeing what comes along.

There’s still the matter of the bills that need to be paid, of course… But, actually, I’ve never been worried about that. What I’ve been worried about was finding a job which I can feel like a grown up doing, and taking pride in. And that’s what I need to stop doing for now.

And I can refocus on the things that really are important. I know that I am one of the luckiest men in the world; I have a great family, I have the most incredible wife I could possibly imagine (honestly, how many men have wives — or fiancee’s, technically, I suppose — who would have let them wander around Ireland for a month?); I have good and honorable friends that I’m blessed to have and that I’m proud to claim as friends; and the standard list of blessings including shelter, a car, good access to edible food, and so on.

And so this morning, Jennifer and I drove out to Home Depot to pick up some lights for our office and some parts for the shelves that we’re working on. I glanced at a book of landscaping and deck ideas and got really excited by some of the pictures and diagrams that I saw. And I realized that defocusing my "what’ll-I-do-when-I-grow-up?" obsession gave me energy to be excited about working in our yard, on the shelves, on our house. It was a good feeling. A great feeling.

And driving home, we passed by fields where the fog was rising from plough lines in the ground. I was enchanted. When we got home, I installed the light on my side of the office and decided that I wanted to go back to the field and take a picture. The fog had burned off by then, but I drove around on some of the back roads, even managed to get a bit lost in the southern reaches of Solano County for a few minutes (Dixon has some marvelous back roads in the agricultural areas) and saw some great old barns, some great landscaping, and the old Dixon cemetary. One of the elementary schools in Dixon is called Tremont, which is the same name as one of the back roads several miles from here, which you can take to get to Davis. I wondered if there was a connection.

The lesson being, I suppose, that sometimes you can find some really amazing things… if you’re willing to keep an eye open, to accept that some wrong turns are inevitable, and accept that the things you wanted to find — like the field of fog that I wanted to take a picture of, or some idealistic notion of a One True Calling that I’ve been desperately trying to find for at least the past ten years — just might not be there.