I feel like a few years ago, when I used to write a lot more, I was able to make words do whatever I wanted.  When I wrote, I felt like I were a craftsperson building something lovely and I could always choose just the right shade of eggshell white for this room, the perfect bay windows for that... These days I feel more like I'm just grabbing any old bricks that I think will roughly fit and shoving them together to make something that'll do but isn't at all pretty.  I hate it.  I can't find all my materials any more.

Of course, my own livejournal from a few years ago may tell a different story.

I may as well admit that this is partially out of envy, too.  I don't want to be a widely read blogger like Chris (way too much time and effort for something I don't really care about), but I feel a bit of a twinge whenever he tells me about getting another magazine article published.  I could totally do that too.  I just... I don't want to.  I can start any time.  Really.

But seriously, I could do it if I tried, and if my writing were at the level it used to be.  And it would be nice to have stuff published once in a while.

I've been playing a lot of Crackdown these days.  It's an old game, one that I first played in SLC with Randy, and the great thing about it is that it's about as open-world as a game can get while still having a point (which, it must be said, this one just barely does - the only missions are to kill a series of 21 criminal kingpins).  Some nights I do missions, but usually I just hang out.  What can I say?  It's a better world than my own, and I like to take my time and enjoy the scenery.  It was the same with the Fallout series - sometimes it was nice just to relax, mess around, and blow up an entire city block all at the same time with my fully upgraded cluster grenades.

We learned a new word at Korean class the other night - 튀다.  It's the word used to describe water splattering - the way some drops kind of go off in their own direction, and it's also applied to people in much the same way - in English we'd say a 튀는 사람 "marches to the beat of his own drummer".  This is considered a fairly negative thing in Korean workplace culture, but to me as a Westerner (and to me as a me) it's great.  I wear the adjective with pride.  It really seems like the more Korean groupthink I encounter, the more convinced I become that our Western ideas about individuality are just better.  Not that we really follow them - how many people do you know who are *truly* individuals and not a part of one herd or another, however small - but at least it's a good ideal.  I hate trying to fit in, especially when the deck is stacked against me from the start.