Thoughts and more
Of all of the box codes at my disposal this one in particular is my favorite. I cannot exactly explain why that is however. It is dark and terrifying in its own right, but at the same time the figure depicted is somehow graceful and beautiful to look at. The horns around her head look almost like a crown, as if she is wearing all of her ugliness proudly, saying 'yes this is how I am, look at me and if you cannot stand it then turn away'. Maybe where she is from this 'deformity' as we would call it in our world would in fact be a mark of true beauty and she is in fact the envy of her world and her people. Perceptions are a strange thing, subjective to our raising, environment and our mindset at the time of seeing what it is we see. But then that is probably why I love this box code. I am always curious as to how other people view it. Is it scary? Beautiful? Ugly to them? When they see this box code used does it change how people perceive the words I write in the post? Just something I wonder at times haha.
Now then what is it I really want to say here? Well a lot and a little all at once. Most of you know I do not care to talk about or complain about things going on in my life especially in scrap post, mostly because I realize I have a very very good life. In a way I feel I want to just talk with you all, and just kind of get some things off of my mind and maybe clear up some things that might have started to grow around me due to my very sudden absence and some of the recent changes I have been doing in Kalea. I suppose I will start with the easiest thing, and that is where I have been.
I know I know I have been gone, and that is really unlike me. I typically try to log onto chat once every day, or every other day just to keep up and keep an eye on things as is my responsibility as a chat moderator. I've really not been able to do that at all for the last few days, and a while longer honestly. Some of you have even noticed the time between my PM responses has been steadily increasing as well. For that I am truly sorry. I know how frustrating it is to send a PM and to have it looked at and never respond to. I never believed I would become someone that did that, yet alas it seems I have and this has got to change. What has been going to to change me so much? Well a lot of it can be attributed to the holidays. Where to start?
For those of you who do not know I work in retail right now. I am between degrees, and so I am just working in whatever I can to gain as much money as possible to start paying off loans and such and start my life in full. I have been working at this place for about 4 1/2 years now, on and off as school allowed, and I have spent a LOT of christmas's there let me tell you. Normally this time of year its a lot less stressful for me. Usually I have just gotten done with finals, no more school and all I have to do is focus on work and getting ready for next semester. For one reason or another though this December turned into absolute chaos. Yes it is always busy, but its never as crazy as it was this season. It's like people opened up a can of crap and started slinging it everywhere. I work in the coffee shop and as a cashier, and as it is written in my job description it is my job to sell certain items to you. I have a quota and everything. If you don't want it that is fine, you say know we move on and say 'Merry Christmas' and keep going. Sadly that was not what it was like this year. Nearly Every person seemed to feel that my asking if they would like this one or two extra times was a personal affront on them, and then took it upon themselves to tell me exactly how low and petty I was and how I should be ashamed, yadda yadda. This is besides the point though, because everyone who works retail knows that customers are TERRIBLE at this time of year, so really this is no big change. No the biggest difference was the management this year. We have a new manager who has taken over the store for the last 5 or 6 months, but this is her first christmas in our store. What is hugely different between our store and her old store is 1) the volume of people is nearly double her old stores volume, and 2) our store is a test store which means we get buyers and the CEO and other upper management people in almost every week. Its a lot to deal with for sure, and it takes a special kind of person to operate this kind of store. While this manager has some good qualities, she is not really well suited for the challenges this store presents. Other employees have tried to talk with her and help her understand how to do things in a way that takes a lot of stress off her, and by extension us, but she is not the type to really listen to those who are 'below' her. And I use that word specifically because she has said that to me. Anyway, I respect her and her position as my boss, but the way she set up and organized the shifts, the work load, and the task distribution made it 3 or 4 times harder on everyone that it should have been. We the employers were so bogged down by tasks that were miss managed time ways to the point we were frustrated and tired from working 12 hours shifts and getting nearly nothing finished because of the terrible understanding of what was actually going where. This made upper management mad at our manager, which made her mad at us, which pretty much made working this season a nightmare and with team moral low a lot of people's customer service hurt as well. I have honestly never known a holiday season as mad crazy as this one was, as frustrating as this one was, and as gosh darn tiring as this one was. Still, however, I have a job and I am very happy for it. Yes I think all of this should have been handled better than it was, but I am crossing my fingers that this is a lesson learned by everyone and it will all improve from here.
On a much smaller, but still related note my phone of 2 years finally reached it's limit and somewhere around the 18, 19 or 20th stopped sending me notifications of my emails. Not only that I could not log onto Mizahar from my phone about 50% of the time I tried. It has no wifi, bluetooth, oh and picture messages no longer send or receive. The phone has basically given up on life, and I will contribute a good portion of my absence to this fact. Luckily I got a new phone for Christmas so this will not be an issue for much longer
Finally, there were some other things that happened this season that have kept me away, and not really because of time constraints or something like that. I do not usually, or ever really, talk about my personal life here on the forums. I typically try to stray away from it because really there is no reason to bog others down with some of my worries when everyone else I know has problems of their own. This time however I feel that there needs to be some form of explanation, or at least a brief quip on my part. I have gotten a glimpse into a lot of people's lives through Mizahar, and for those who are truly interested and want to know I feel it is only fitting that I allow this for you as well. If you want to hear this little bit of personal info from me then please feel free to keep reading, if you are not interested then please go ahead and skip the next paragraph on to the next where I will be taking a change of pace to talk about the future
Like I said I do not talk about my personal life much on the forums, as I like to keep my own counsel and the counsel of a select few closer friends. It may be a surprise, or not, that I do not actually trust very easily, at least with my own personal worries and such. I don't like bothering people, and so by extension I usually do not talk about my family, friends, relationships to anyone but those I feel like are closer friends. For those who do not know I have very strong bonds within my family, and in fact my family as a whole rely very much on one another. I am very proud to say that we have weathered a lot of storms together, and to be honest I doubt there is anything that could take on my family when we have all gotten together to fight against something. Its just how we have always been. I've always been able to rely on them for anything, and I like to think them on me. Recently though, really recent within the last couple weeks even, thats not really been the case anymore. There has been some personal stuff going on and there is now a fissure driven between my family, one that I do not have any control over and there is not much I can really do about it. Even so, that means that the one thing in my life that has always, always been constant is now not so strong and unmovable as it was before. It really shook me, like having the rug ripped out from under me and for a while I was really not sure what was going to happen. I still don't honestly. So the last few weeks combined with the tiredness from work, the epic fail of my phone, and all of this in my personal life (right in time for Christmas too) I lost any desire really to write anything at all. Or do anything now that I think about it. Its coming back now thankfully. Christmas was a lot more pleasant than I expected, and while the future is still unknown I do feel a little more in control than I have for the last little while. With all that down, and off my chest so to speak, I am more than ready to wrap up this little detour from the norm and get back to the tasks at hand. Bad things will happen from time to time, life is weird and confusing and rarely what we expect it to be.
Well the new year is coming, and with it I have a whole slew of new years resolutions. Some personal ones include getting my resume more fleshed out and edited, and of course getting more regular with my workouts and such. On Mizahar though things are a bit different! Recently I was informed that the way I handle projects is very... sporadic. I basically have a very short attention span, and as soon as I get bored of something I usually give up on what I was doing before and start on something new and 'exciting'. This little personality trait of mine has shown itself a lot in Mizahar, given I have had more than 14 characters since I started 2 years ago lol. Besides the 'short attention span' I am also very lazy. Yes, lazy, that thing that we should never be, or so I thought. It turns out being lazy is not actually a bad thing, and this person very clearly informed me that laziness in and of itself is not bad. It's laziness that is not rightly directed that turns into something not so awesome. For instance its fine to be lazy and want to do nothing after a long days work, but its definitely not good to be lazy all day and do nothing especially when you have something to do. So I want to see if I can take these little insights into my personality and try and turn my negative traits (as I believe them to be) into positives.
My attention span, my focus, is something like a river flowing constantly, shifting and turning and twisting and never staying long in the same place. I focus on one thing, then after a while I lose interest and shift to something else. So I think to counter this I need to have a few projects going on at once. Maybe 3-4 or so, and as I feel my attention wandering move on to another project so that its fresh and new, over and over until I finish all of them. I think by doing this not only will it keep my attention and focus in Mizahar, but keep everything I do feeling fresh, new and exciting
. I cannot sit still I have found, I always have to have something going on to be happy, and I think lately I have been 'sitting' too much and it is beginning to pull on me. As for my laziness, well I will be lazy! I will put in a good days work, maybe several days, and then I will give myself time to be strictly lazy. Turn off the computer and the phone and just do whatever I want. No writing, no emails, no house work, etc. Sit and play a game, maybe just write a post for my PC or two if I choose to. I wont try to organize it more than 'when I feel laziness coming on I will try to do one thing before giving in'. And never sacrifice things I need to get done just to be lazy. I suppose I will earn my lazy times lol. I am hoping that by jumping between projects my need to be lazy will be suppressed a little, but when I am lazy I am determined to be uber lazy. I guess that is how I recharge my batteries. The problem will be not letting myself sink into a whole where I do nothing but laze around, but I have ways to fight that should the time come
This scrap is crazy long, especially for me. This is the most writing I have done in a long time, and it feels good to type again. I might just be immersed in the experience of writing and just can't keep my fingers from typing more and more lol. I think I will end this super huge scrap on a note from me as an ST. Again some of you may or may not know that I have a lot of dreams for the future, and one of them is I want to one day own and run my own company. If you want to know specifically what the companies does then that is a talk for another day lol. Anyway I am learning all of the qualities a good leader possesses, and one of the first ones I was taught was that a good leader accepts the blame when his team does wrong, and passes the praise to his team when they do right. Kalea is my team, and while it is only a team of two I know that it is still fully my responsibility for the state that its in. I have been working to find more ST's to take over the cities that need some love, but thus far my search has not been all that successful. I know there is more I could do, and that I should do for the players there. I fully accept that Kalea is how it is right now because of my actions as its leader, and as its RS I will make do my utmost to bring it up to where it deserves to be. Its players are amazing, and it is very active. SO I need to figure out exactly why players do not want to volunteer for ST positions there. I know a lot of the players are graders, and volunteer to develop and do some small things like that, but I have yet to find anyone who is really willing to take that big step up to become an ST. It might very well be because of me, and if so I will need to work on that. Neo, bless her heart, is a doll and I am not sure where I would be without her. She is the one ST who has stuck around with me this long and I very much appreciate that. Wind Reach needs someone desperately, and so does Alvadas. So I think I will focus on those two cities first and see if someone, somewhere would like to play with giant eagles or in a city of Illusion ^.^
As a member of team Syliras I am also very appreciative of EVERYONE on staff in that region. They are an inspiration to me, and a lot of the times they are the ones that keep me going when things start to get really tough and unbearable. Though I may not say it, I feel like our team we have in Mizahar, the staff, is one of the closest I have every had the pleasure of working with. Those players who have never been on staff may not realize it, but becoming an ST is like joining a family. We talk and laugh and joke with one another, spend time OOC on skype just talking about random stuff. Heck in Halloween we even had a staff only movie night for the heck of it, and I am trying to make a 2nd soon >.>. All of the ST's right now are hard workers and really good people. Traverse and Gossamer are also amazing team members as the RS team. WE talk about a lot of the behind the scene stuff and they are probably 2 of the coolest people I have ever met. Gossamer is one of the most down to earth people I have ever met, and I know she has set me straight a number of times and I am better for it. Traverse is super sweet and fun to talk to, not to mention crazy creative. She has so many projects going on its ridiculous. Those of you playing in her region give her a huge thank you! And to Gossamer as well. Until you sit where Traverse and I sit you will not understand the scope to which Gossamer gives to this site. Its a huge amount, more than I can even understand as I am sure there is more she does even I don't see. I don't know where I am going with all of this, some weird tangent that ultimately ends with: My staff, my teams, the ST's are all amazing and awesome people, and I very much think of them like a Mizahar family. Its not always perfect of course, but I still very happy to be a part of it.
Well this scrap has taken so many left turns I fell like I am now heading backwards, and so I think it is time to start wrapping it up. I think Ill update my thoughts more in the future as I gather them. I have a lot on my mind, a lot planed, an inspiration building and determination in my heart. This new year I pledge to be a better RS, a better person, and to master the areas I am weakest in. To everyone, as always, Happy Writing.
Question your Reality,
Mirage
by Evalin on December 8th, 2014, 3:52 pm 
But, jokes aside, this isn’t only a joke. Although I confess I have put in effort and “combed” youtube in order to find this for you, I’m sincerely hooked on the intriguing guitar music now. I hope you'll be okay with it. And happy new year 
