Two Rings

Hello World.

Better late than never.  Last weekend was a good weekend and this week has been a good week; I suppose I've just been enjoying myself too much to sit down and write.

I wear two rings.  One is large, rounded, white gold, and rather scratched up.  That's my wedding ring.  As the scratches can attest to, I very seldom take it off.  It's still shines quite nicely however, still a fitting symbol of my everlasting dedication to the love of my life.  The other ring is small, squared, and stainless steel.  It's hardy, industrial, and unpretentious.  That's my writer's ring.  I chose it to be the symbol of my life's challenge, the extra-mile I have designated for myself after my family and friends are cared for.  It's sole purpose is to remind me never to give up on being creative.  When I look at it, it says to me, "So what if you haven't done much of anything creative lately?  You're still a writer."

My writer's ring fits completely inside my wedding ring, because my family will always be the larger priority.  And I am happy with that priority.  Given the choice between setting ink to paper (or finger to keyboard) and just chillin out with Pao, 9 times out of 10 I choose to chill out with Pao, or my friends, or my relatives, and I feel no regret about that decision.  The people I love are more important than the arrogant artistic flame that burns inside me.  That choice is easy.  When it gets hard however is when I'm at work, watching a progress bar crawl across a computer screen and reflecting on the fact that though many people will pay you to waste time (*coughcustomerservicecough*), hardly anyone is willing to give you a dime for doing something extraordinary.

Unless you're like Notch.  Notch is kind of a nerd legend.  Most people will not have heard of him, but he is a figure of awe for those who have.  He worked making online games for a while, and then started his own independent project called Minecraft.  It can be accurately described as the "Best Lego Game Ever" in that in allows the average person an unprecedented ability to create things in three dimensional space.  In my opinion however, the true genius lies in the fact that the game algorithmically generates a world for you in a matter of seconds whenever you ask it to.  Mountains, oceans, caves, forests -- all generated by random numbers fed into an incredibly intricate formula.  A world miles and miles wide, no less!

There is a much more practical reason to care about Notch, however.  While Minecraft was in it alpha stage of development, it attracted a cult following that grew exponentially.  Thus, when Notch released the beta version and started selling memberships which included all future game updates for eternity, hundreds of thousands of people bought the beta.  (I was one of them.)  Each beta was about $17.

Notch literally became a millionaire overnight.

So what did he do then?  He kept working on Minecraft of course, refining it and expanding it until he finally declared that it had gone past beta into an actual 1.0 version.  He continues to develop it to this day.  And now the buzz is that he's working on a space game.

This is how you recognize a true creative genius: when you hand them a million dollars, they say, "Oh good, now I can continue doing what I've been doing."  It isn't about the profit for them, it's just about doing what they love, being what they can be.

Pao's hero is Jim Henson.  I always enjoyed his work, but since meeting Pao, I too have become a die-hard fan of the man and his genius.  His ambition was no less than to change the world through puppets.  And by God, most people would agree that he did it!  There are people in the world who are both ridiculously talented and daring enough to devote themselves to something that sounds completely crazy.

Deep inside of this broad American chest, there is a long-haired little starving wild man beating against the inside of my ribcage, demanding that he too be allowed to create worlds.  There's a thing that guys do: we look at someone doing something and we think, "Yeah, I could do that."  Some guys watch a mechanic working on a car and think, "Yeah, I could do that if I felt like spending the time on it."  Some guys watch a martial arts demonstration and think, "Yeah, I could do that if I really wanted to."  It's a testosterony thing that I think all guys do, both out of egoism and an innate sense of our untapped potential as human beings.

Me, I watch a enthralling movie, I read an engrossing book, or I play a deeply immersive game, and I think -- quite seriously, even though I know it sounds delusional -- "Yeah, I could make something like this."

Oh, but where is the time?

Well, the time is in all the episodes of Fraggle Rock I watch with Pao, all the dinners I eat with aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents and cousins, all the inside joking I do with my bros, and so on and so forth.  And I wouldn't give up any of that for anything.

Those forty hours a week I spend in the office on the other hand...

Therein lies the great problem of being creative.  A man can have a rich social life.  A man can have a steady job.  And a man can have the stamina to be creative.  But I'll be fo-shizzle-my-nizzled if a man can have all three of those things at the same time!

And so I wear this writer's ring, whose job it is to reassure me that maybe, just maybe, there will come a day when the steady job is not quite as necessary as it is now.  Maybe, just maybe.

Another book translated.  Pao's been nauseous a lot lately, but otherwise we're doing well.