I'll Name This the "Week of Ups and Downs"

Remember when I said I would write on Tuesdays? Notice how it's Wednesday? Yeah, I didn't write yesterday. I ended up going to sleep instead. I don't regret it. Also, I'm making up for it with this post. So, you know, still good.

I want to be Kurt Vonnegut when I grow up.

So, this week is just all over the place for me. There's some ups and some downs, some things I'm quite excited about and things that have me a bit stressed out. But that's okay. As Kurt Vonnegut points out, good stories have some shape to them. Note the cool little graphic above. My story for this week is mostly highs with some dips. Allow me to elaborate. I'll start with the ups, then dip into the lows.

I have big plans for Friday. Really, really big plans. How big? How about saving the world big. That's pretty big. That's right, XCOM 2 comes out on Friday and I'm planning to play it pretty much all day. I adored the last XCOM game, so much so that not only have I spent 143 hours playing the game, I also wrote a blog post about it. Because I worked so much this weekend (I punched in on Monday with 18 hours already logged) I have the luxury of being able to stay home all day on Friday. That means it will be a non-stop XCOM party almost all day. Check out the message I have planned for the aliens in the video below.

The reason I specify that I'll be playing XCOM almost all day is because that's not my only plan for Friday. I'm also going to go out to Friday Night Magic to sling some cardboard. I'm packing a ton of geeky excitement into this Friday, and I can't wait. Many of my fellow Modern players will be away at a big Magic tournament in Providence so I will most likely play a draft instead. Oath of the Gatewatch came out weeks ago and I still haven't have a chance to draft it, so I'm pretty excited. Friday will be a very good day.

So, there's my ups. Lots of good stuff going on this Friday. Whatever stresses I may face it is massively helpful to be able to look forward to Friday. "If I can just get to Friday I won't have to stress anymore," I tell myself.

I did say there were also downs. So now I'll take a moment to address those. This week I'm feeling stressed about work. One of the many programs I (attempt) to run is a series of teen fellowship times. In the past they have been weekly, but due to some complaints from parents they have been changed to be monthly events. The stress here comes from the fact that since switching them to be monthly events attendance has dropped. To zero. This means I spend a considerable amount of time planning and coordinating for an event that ends up just not happening. It's extremely frustrating.

This Saturday was supposed to be one such teen fellowship. I held out hope that maybe people would come until today I finally got enough people to RSVP today (which is itself a pulling teeth style activity) and realized that there just isn't interest in attending this Saturday. So I'm just feeling kind of flustered. I know that this will be viewed as a failure on my part. I'm doing my best. I've done all I can to make this a success. It's bringing me down. A lot. I'm just so tired of feeling like I'm fighting an uphill battle just to not be viewed as a screw up by everyone at work. I'm doing my best. The worst feeling in the world is to try my hardest and just, apparently, fall short.

But at least there's Friday. As much as I get frustrated with the situation at work I can remember that I have a wonderful day planned for myself on Friday. On Friday I will see friends, I will have fun, and I will feel good enough. Kind of funny that I have to go to video games and gaming events to feel good enough when working for a church makes me feel so down on myself. The place I go for unconditional acceptance and support is my local game store, not my church. There's a whole separate blog post there and I'm digressing pretty heavily.

That last paragraph makes me super uncomfortable. But I said I would be more vulnerable this year, especially on my blog. I'll just hope that if anybody who would care saw this post they stop reading much earlier when they got bored of my video game talk.

I don't want to end this post on such a negative note. XCOM 2 is going to be amazing. From what I understand it's actually being released at midnight, so I'm tempted to stay up and get some gameplay in right when it comes out. I know my wife wouldn't be such a big fan of that, though. We'll see what happens. If I don't I'll just wake up super early like a kid on Christmas day and play it as the sun rises.

Because this post didn't go up until today that means that my next post will be tomorrow. This post turned out to be pretty long and cover some actual human emotion, so who knows what tomorrow's post will look like. You should come check it out. Just don't tell anyone that I secretly feel human emotions. That's just between us. Have a good night, friend.