Earlier this year in the spring I went through a phase where I was really holding conflicting emotions that were valid all at the same time.  Having both positive and negative feeling about something and having both be justified.  Maybe it's the same recently, too.

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I got the main bulk of my Christmas stuff done!  I don't know if I will play Santa this year, there are just a few deliveries to do but mostly it's just a matter of waiting for things to ship, both from and to me.  I'm glad to have mostly pulled it off successfully despite starting so late.

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Rhythm Quest dev work has been taking a bit of a lull because I've been occupied with that, and other stuff, but I'm still chugging along here and there, as I always try to do.  I released a patch update the other day and been continuing to work here and there on custom levels and bugfixes.

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I play Gran Turismo 4 here and there, it's fun, though I feel like I'd be so much more terrible without abusing save-states.  I think it's not just the steering wheel, but the physics in the game are more punishing than in GT3 I think, the tuning and handling of the cars tends to make them just harder to turn in general, so careful attention must be given to how the cars are tuned otherwise it's really hard to get through the corners (and sometimes just gentle curves) well.

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I finally hit sub-50 in Super Metroid!  I had a run which seemed totally botched, but I picked up the pieces and tried to clutch together a PB -- it ended up being enough for a 49:45.  I can definitely do better with this route (KPDR), so I might give it a handful more tries so that I can put together a slightly cleaner run, but past that it might be time to start looking at Phantoon-first routes and seeing if I can manage those.

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I bought a Womier SK-71 to be given as a gift.  It's actually super nice; it makes me excited to get my next two (wait...when did I order so many) keyboards.  Overall it's solidly built -- it's aluminum and the stock stabilizers are actually great which is a welcome change from the keyboards I've been using up until this point.  It sounds nice, too, and comes in a nice blue color.

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I have a lot to be thinking about, I guess, this weekend and beyond.  I feel happy and bad and glad and sad.  It's hard for me, though, to put aside the nagging feeling that I've just been selfishly ruining things left and right over time, just a pattern that I see.  Of course, maybe it's just confirmation bias, like of course your mistakes are going to stand out more than all of the times when you just did okay, just like how it always stands out when you have to put away somebody else's dishes but you don't really think about the times when that happened for you because you weren't there to notice it.

Of course, even if it was a pattern, it's not like there is really anything to do from that information; I think I am fortunately past the point where I simply use that information to conclude that I'm a royal @#$!-up and am just doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.  But it's frustrating to see myself fall victim to the same ignorance multiple times.  I think if it was something more like "being too self-deprecating" or "not strong enough to face vulnerability" I think it would be easier for me to stomach, you know?  But no, this is something more just like I was just thinking about myself and disregarded what other people might be thinking and feeling.

I mean, it is not like that never happened to me or other people before.  I'm used to being someone who quietly notices things; like when I was at a dinner get-together and one person in our group was too excitedly ordering things and didn't leave much room for our guests to have enough of a say.  But somehow there's certain things where I just screwed up a lot.  It's really not that good.

I went diving back into my time capsules to search for some tranquility from the past and this time the past reminded me of other times when I was immature and didn't know how to deal with situations properly -_-.  Well, somehow, that doesn't really dissuade or discourage me from continuing to look back for comfort.  Maybe history repeats itself sometimes, even if we fail in the same ways, at the very least it means that we will continue to learn each time, and be reminded that even though we made mistakes, things turned out okay in the end.

Sometimes I think about the mistakes I've made over the years.  Just all sorts of little and big ones alike.  There are some mistakes that I've been able to absolve myself for, because frankly, they were mistakes that I don't blame myself for in the slightest.  "Forced errors", you could call them.  I was put into a situation where it was all but understandable that I would fail.  Marching band was one of those times.  I did a lot of stupid things, but even stupider was the fact that the situation I found myself in set me up for failure.  Given the circumstances, I performed really well -- though, I seemed to have come away with more trauma than some of my other contemporaries.

Earlier this year, too.  It's not really that it was "not my fault" or anything like that, but I feel like I empathize with my past self in a way that, I would forgive them for not knowing how to come out of a painful situation with no losses.

Sometimes I end up forgiving myself because "I was too young" or "I didn't know better".  A lot of my earlier social interactions go into that placing.  Yeah, what I did really wasn't good.  But I still needed time to learn those lessons, and did not have the best of teachers on my side (to put it lightly).  There are even some really big mistakes that I made in the past that I think I can forgive myself for.

I don't know if it is all of them, though.  Sometimes I look at what happened and it's hard to not just come to the conclusion, "you should have known better".  I guess that is still something that can be treated with forgiveness, though.  Like I said in the beginning, sometimes you can carry two conflicting emotions at the same time.  It is accepting the lack and futility of perfection that allows us to confront our mistakes and begin to grow toward becoming something better than before.

In the past when I used to think more about self-rejection and worthlessness, I think it often made me feel that I need to try and accept others more readily, so that I can also learn that myself is worth accepting.  That I cannot stop judging myself unless I also learn to stop judging others.

Maybe when I make mistakes like this, it is not merely a reminder of the responsibility I have toward others, but also a reminder to accept the mistakes of others.  That forgiveness, like acceptance, is something that might also need to be given in order to be received.

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But separate from all of that, there is a loss to be grieved, a loss of something that I never really had in the first place.  I don't really know how I feel about it yet.  It is simultaneously something that wasn't important at all to me that I lost, but also something that seems like my world revolves around it.  I think the things that come to my mind when I think about my loss, is "do I really want to cling to this, too?"

After looking for Kiki's shadow for 10 years, I am not only wary but also weary.  But I feel like =hope=, =love=, and =faith= are the only things that are strong enough to remind me that there is still light in the darkness, if I will just keep on continuing to walk forward.  Even in those times before when I found myself in the clutches of despair, those things still reminded me to find the next light.  I'm no longer in those clutches anymore, but I find myself, again, being gently pulled forward by a voice, telling me that wandering through the dark is still worthwhile.

I know that I lost my anchor already, so I may as well continue to drift in one direction or another.

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Edit: I realize that a lot of my more thoughtful posts sound really depressing -_-.  I'm actually doing fine, of course I'm having a downer of a week, but the things I said about hope, love, and faith are still in my mind.  It's going to be ok.