Unexpected guest

Unexpected guest, #1
Originally uploaded by Trevor_.

In advance of visits this weekend from my mom and Rose, Sara's sister, we got an unexpected guest yesterday morning. This little guy was hanging around the neighbor's house, crying like a ...well, like a lost kitten. At first, he hissed at me and acted like he was going to bolt, so I left him alone. When I came out a little later, he ran over to me and climbed through the fence. I brought him inside and gave him a little breakfast, after which he settled down. I called the shelter to come pick him up, and while in a perfect world we would have kept him and he would have grown up to be the best cat ever, I think he'll still get a better life than the one ahead of him on the streets. The rampant kitten gang activity in our neighborhood is truly out of control, and I would hate to see his face on the evening news.

Enchantment under the Stars

So we want to thank everybody for coming to the Enchantment under the Stars Homecoming Ball and for being so fabulous. You can see Sally's pictures here. It was wonderful having so many friends in one place.

So what's your book about?

Joygantic came over last night after taking Sara out for drinks and dinner, and he gave me a gentle nudge about my lack of blog efforts. He's right. I haven't been feeling the blog lately. I suppose my lack of motivation is a mixture of my ongoing efforts to mentally reconfigure the purpose of this blog now that we're no longer in Denmark, as well as a general demotivation caused by my generally uninteresting life right now. Most days are spent reading e-mail, poking about the Web, and watching television. Which points to a larger issue. When I was an active, motivated scholar, I constantly wished I had more time to research and write. Now, I have nothing but time, and what am I doing with it? Hanging out on Metafilter.

This lack of forward movement seems to me pretty clearly a symptom of my growing apathy toward academia in general. Bottom line, I just don't want to do that anymore. Maybe I would feel differently if the Denmark position were a more positive experience, but I suspect not. When I think about it, I've had misgivings about academia stretching back to when I was an undergrad, but I think I got caught so caught up in the competitive spirit of graduate school that I failed to notice the difference between the motivation of being good at something and the motivation of actually wanting to do that thing.

So I'm trying to pull every string I have in order to find something that will take me out of academia and keep us in Seattle. Unfortunately, the job I mentioned with the major videogame company didn't pan out. There are a few other leads I'm working on, so hopefully something will come of them. Sara keeps having dreams (okay, we'll go ahead and call them nightmares) that I have to go back to Denmark for another year. I don't think it will come to that, but I'm doing my best to insure that it doesn't.

In the meantime, I am continuing to work on my book. Hopefully, I will get more motivated in that direction in the coming weeks. I need to do a bunch of interviews with various game developers as well as do some more digging about the independent videogame industry. If you hear of any jobs, let me know.