I don’t want to give the impression that I was this ball of righteous indignation for the whole year, since political obsession really only took up part of my time. Don’t get me wrong: I was obsessed, but I could at least come up for air and focus on more immediate concerns.
One of those being, “What do I want to do with my English degree?” The answer came quick: I didn’t want a creative job. I wanted to keep my creative endeavors as a hobby, paid for by my unrelated job. Fortunately, I’m a creature of habit at heart—the idea of a rote job didn’t sound bad at all. In my search for a career guidepost, I came across a course I was going to take in my old major, and had coming up in this one: Technical Writing.
For those who might not know, technical writing is essentially the creation of documents that are informative. Manuals, program documentation, style guides, proposals, and to a lesser extent memos, emails and any professional communication. These all fell into the discipline’s purview, and at the time it was a relatively underemployed field compared to most writing jobs. Not many people who studied Joyce in university wanted to go into a career writing how-to guides for installing washing machines, I figured. I loved the idea of it, so I set my sights on the role with my first forays into guided, structured education on document design, collaborative editing and professional communication. I started eyeing possible internships, knowing that at this point in my academic career, I only had at best a year’s left of courses. No matter how much you might try to be above it, every senior’s bound to feel some excitement at the prospect of graduation, be it due to anticipation, exhaustion or just plain boredom with their current lot in life.
Beyond all this, I fell into a guild back on Azeroth that became, and to this day still is my core social circle. They’re known as the Lotus Accord, and over the several years since I joined shifted from roleplay-oriented guild, to catch-all, to raiding and social, to growing beyond their roots as a World of Warcraft community. We’re still a small group and we want it to stay that way, since we actually know people here. We use our online handles of course, but it feels like we’re all on a first-name basis. The only thing keeping us from regular meetups is the unfortunate reality that we live all over the world. All we need is a new member in the far east and an Antarctic researcher for us to be the guild version of Mr. Worldwide. Maybe an astronaut too.
It was that sort of real connection that I had been craving, where even though we didn’t know each other in reality, we still cared about one another. Maybe life will pull us apart eventually, but as long as we care about keeping up the bonds we’ve forged, I doubt it. Even if that happens, the memories still mean something. With the world changing so much, so often, you take solace in finding any rock in that endless storm.
