By way of reply

A little over a month ago, Landon Wilkins made a post on one of my introductory entries.  He asked me two very solid questions that I feel are quite worth exploring here.

First.  Landon asks, "What is your base motivation in life?"  He explained that he wanted to know what drives my actions, and my personality.  I've thought a lot over the years about that one and, especially lately, about what drives personality in general.  I find that certain things are at the core of each and every person's life, and that this selection of traits is different for everyone.  Some people find themselves devoted completely to pursuit of skills, or being the absolute best at what they do.  Some follow their ideals, high thoughts of ethics and morals and justice and other such abstracts.  Some are logical to the extreme, while others follow whimsy and passion wherever it takes them.

As for me, I find that certain concepts are absolutely tantamount to my lifestyle.  I am, above all else, dedicated to justice and to love.  If something is truly unfair, it sits very, very poorly with me, sometimes to the point that I experience physical pain in one respect or another if I am unable to do anything to fix it.  In my life, I need to feel that things are fair and just, else I more or less shut down and am unable to cope.  On the other side of things, I frequently discover that love drives me.  I do a lot of strange, abnormal things, and most of them, one way or another, come down to love.  Love for other worlds and new ideas, love for certain people, love for creation... but that warm feeling of love lies beneath them all.

Subsidiary to those two primary drives, I look for logic and reason, for understanding (in a largely philosophical sense of the word), and for gratification.  I am very much a selfish type of person, in that in my spare time I generally do whatever feels best at the moment.  I waste an enormous amount of time just reading dumb websites or playing video games, for no better reason than that I felt like it.  This is the same reason that I flaunt my odd style of dress, and that I carry a bag stamped with my own design -- I am very egotistical and, despite my joking about it, I realize that at times it is a huge problem for me.  If the bottom line doesn't come down to me getting something tangible, I tend to write many activities off as wasteful (even if they are helpful to others in whatever way).  However, of course, this flies in the face of my two bigger motives, and as a result I find myself in very frequent and very heated internal conflict over it.  I cannot feel as though justice is being properly served if I am wasting my time so badly while others that I care about suffer (because, of course, everyone has their own problems), and at times I cannot indulge both myself and my sense of love simultaneously.

The second question (or questions, I suppose) Landon posed is: "How do you want your life to be?  What do you want to do, experience, achieve?"  I honestly don't have many specific plans.  I'm trying to cover as many contingencies as I can, what with getting my degree in a field I don't particularly want to work in (CS).  I want to be an artist, or at the very least operate in a creative capacity.  I don't really care whether that's as a video game designer or as a writer or as a graphic designer or what, but I need to create.  It's just What I Do.  Having a job doing so is... well, it would make life much less painful if my current employment experience in retail has taught me anything at all.

As for personal life goals, I know exactly who I want to marry.  I know more or less what steps I'm going to have to take to make that happen, and I'm mostly on the right track.  I haven't got any particular preference as to how I want my family to be, though I do know that I'm going to wait for at least a few years after marriage to have kids if I end up deciding to have them at all.  I want to emulate the examples of my parents as best I can, since to be quite frank they are, without exaggeration, the only couple I've ever known of who have made no major errors in raising their children.

At some point, I wish to explore the world, to see places like Japan and Ireland that are so in tune with me in one or another way.  There are idols I hope to someday meet, like Graham Stark, Paul Saunders, Tarn Adams, Lynne Triplett, Niyazi Sonmez, and frankly a boatload of others.  I want to publish my games, board, tabletop, and computer alike, and get my worlds noticed by some semblance of a mainstream audience.  I want names like the Sigil Galaxy and Little Heartless and Cog Cyprian to be known, even if only in small niche communities.  I want to share all of the fascinating developments in my mind with the entire world, and to inspire others to see as differently as I do.

And beyond the mundane achievements and status that I want, I have a more transcendental need for my life's course.  I need to help people.  I need to use my apparent aptitude for understanding how people's minds and emotions operate and interact to help them solve their problems and to make peace with themselves.  Like creating things, it is again What I Do, and therefore beyond my ability to stop needing to have in my life.

Hopefully, Landon, this entry has given you an adequate answer to your questions.  And as a note both to Landon and to my other regular readers, and to anyone else who happens to stumble onto this page: please ask me questions, that I may try to give you answers.