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I have a suspicion that work is what’s making me not want to play WOW. See, I work two jobs, for a total of 40 hours a week. Both are significant stressors, the first because I don’t enjoy it anymore and I don’t have a guarantee of getting paid (and because, since I set my own schedule, my boss reads that as “you can drop everything at any given time to help me at a moment’s notice”), and the second because it’s dull and repetitive, yet requires enough brainpower and attention that I can’t really think while I do it. Neither has any opportunity for advancement, and neither pays me enough.

You’d think that with all of that, I’d welcome the escape, right? Oddly enough, I don’t. It’s not because I see WOW as work too – in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: WOW doesn’t feel productive enough. See, I have a very strong desire to get out of my current situation. I know I have the skills to be doing a job I actively enjoy, and doing it for enough money to support me and my family. (In point of fact, I’ve been informed in the last month that I’m literally making 1/6 what I could/should be making in my field.) The work that I do, however, exhausts me mentally and emotionally, so I have a hard time bootstrapping myself into being motivated for the work that I want to do. Instead, I think about the work I want to do, chastise myself for not doing it, and additionally get on my own case about doing anything that’s not “productive”.

If I could just get going on the new-job projects, I’d feel more legitimately productive; if I felt more legitimately productive, I wouldn’t have to recoil in horror from anything that wasn’t productive; and if I could get to that point, I could play WOW again.

And that’s why work is killing my desire to play World of Warcraft.

So, yesterday my laptop’s hard drive decided it didn’t want to work anymore. My poor MacBook booted up to the dreaded question-mark folder, and just like that all my files and applications were gone. (I maintain hope, but nothing I’ve tried so far has worked.)

My desktop computer won’t run World of Warcraft for anything like a reasonable amount of time before crashing completely. Either it’ll reboot itself, it’ll shut down, or – most common – it’ll simply lock up completely and refuse to do anything until I reboot it. I have a suspicion that this is because I have a 400W power supply running about 500W of components (the DVD player just flat-out won’t work anymore), but I can’t afford to replace the power supply. On the other hand, it might be a video-card issue, given that things seemed to work okay for about a year with this computer and then all of a sudden stopped working, and also because it only hangs up when I try to do graphics-intensive things with it, like play games.

Either way, though, I functionally have no access to World of Warcraft for now, so I’ll be blogging in the dark, so to speak.