Where I'd like to be in life

When I started thinking about this week's theme, my initial reaction was, "I dunno, what do I want?", so I decided to backwards engineer this list by thinking about what my ideal life would look like, and then deciding what things I would need to get there.

1. (a continued) social life. While I have a small group of close friends - which is the way I like it - with me moving in a few months most of those relationships will be a little trickier to maintain, and I won't have much of any social network starting in this new city. So I'd like to make sure I find new people to hang out with. This is both exciting and a nerve-wracking. I'm a bit awkward. And as I pointed out last week, I've surrounded myself with people who I can take at face value and not have to second guess their intentions, so as I move into a new social circle that might cause some confusion and misunderstanding. I may try to find a new Dungeons and Dragons group, but even that's rife with possible problems; this isn't like a guild in World of Warcraft where you can hide behind a screen, since you're interacting in person with another 4-5 people, you have to actually be able to get along with all of them.

2. A BIG move. As much as a big deal as I'm making about moving, that's only about an hour and a half away, and it's a city I'm decently familiar with even if I don't have many acquaintances. I'd really like to move a significant distance sometime in the next few years, though exactly to where I don't know yet. Definitely a city, but I'd like for it to be farther from home; after living, working, and going to school in a rural area for 21 years, it's definitely time for a change.

3. Direction. As with Katie, I feel somewhat drift less right now. I'm not entirely sure I want to do this job for the rest of my life, though it's fulfilling for now, and I'm already starting to get people asking me whether this is "it" for my career. I don't know? It'll probably be something along these lines, but who knows where I'll end up or what I'll be doing in 10 years. For now, I'm okay working this job, since I think it's cultivating useful skills (even if those are just people skills and practice working in an office), but at some point I'll need to figure out if this is what I want to do with my life, and if I'm even good at it; I've only been at this for about three months, so it's hard to predict how skillful I might be in the future.

4. Inventive creativity. This one is more specific than simply wanting to do more creative endeavors. I'm at the point in some of my hobbies - most notably knitting and baking - where I feel like it would be possible for me to create some of my own designs/recipes, but it's just so much easier to follow someone else's directions. I'm not even sure what I might make would be any good. I've been debating transitioning from my personal blog into a craft blog, but I have all sorts of qualms; I'm not good enough, I don't have enough time, why even bother when there are so many others out there.... But one of my core driving factors is that I love finding out how something works or how to do something and sharing that with someone else. It's why teaching was so appealing, it's part of why I like my current job, and that's part of why blogging interests me. There may just come a point where I need to suck it up and give it a shot, doing so because I enjoy the process and not just to get pageviews.

5. Fiction. I've realized that I am generally happier when I have something to read or watch. Specifically, a work of fiction. Whether it's Terry Pratchett or a sci-fi book borrowed from a friend, I think the draw is that it takes me out of my everyday routine and reminds me that there are other stories out there (a.k.a. not everything revolves around me). Fiction reminds me forces me out of my little bubble to remind me that I really am very tiny in this universe, and also sparks my imagination. What if Lord of the Rings was gritty and (semi) realistic? Or if in a galactic empire, there was a substance required for all space travel that was produced on one small, desolate desert planet where efforts to alter the ecosystem could wipe out the supply? What if hobgoblins, trolls, dwarves, vampires, zombies and magic exist all on the same planet and, specifically, all within a single metropolitan city? What if sexism was reversed and we were genetically engineered to reproduce through cloning with only slight aid from males, so that males and people born through traditional sex where oppressed minorities (and even better, what happens when a male from Earth shows up?) All of these have fascinating possibilities.*

So... those are things I need in my life. Some may be hard to find, others as simple as picking up a book.

*By the way, in case you're interested, those were simplified summaries of Game of Thrones, Dune, any of Terry Pratchett's books but especially the Watch series, and Glory Season, which I'm only partially through and having trouble putting down to do anything productive.