How I parse depression and getting out

I've been having some really interesting meetings lately over a number of different projects. They've been in a number if different areas to do with education, educational technology and peripheral applications of technology in education. It has, to say the least, been exactly what I needed.

Over the last few months I've been struggling with depression. For me this tends to manifest as apathy for everything, procrastination in study and work and a sort of low level constant irritability.  To sum it up I become a grouchy git who just doesn't feel effective. This leads me to not try my hand at anything or get things done which makes me feel even more ineffective and so on. You can see how this goes.

Over the last few days I've been asked to: give my opinion on things I care about, produce a workshop for a conference on a project I'm involved in developing, observe a highly exciting data analytics for education project and just generally had a lot of external validation on the professional and academic front.

For the first time in a while I don't feel like a fraud. I don't feel like a stupid kid holding up the puppet of my adult self. I feel like I'm a little closer to being that which I strive to be professionally. I also realise that I'm not stuck. Something I was feeling for a while, like spinning my wheels, no forward momentum.

It's been said that you have to work through your uninspired periods, that if you only  work when inspired nothing gets done. When I'm depressed I need a little inspiration to pull myself into working. Today I got that excited buzz of inspiration which along with recent validation makes me want to get working again. To build the habit of working again and push myself out of this doldrum I found myself in for the last 5 months.

Today I'm a step closer to realising the me I feel I should be in a professional sense.

Pat

I've had a bit of a go slow with posts this week. It's down to a couple of factors, one of which is the passing of a friend of mine. I'd like to talk a little bit about him here, he was a gentleman and I think it's worth saying a few words about him.

I met Pat through his brother, Danny who is my martial arts instructor and a good friend himself. Pat was pretty unlike Danny, who is a gregarious and extremely outgoing kind of man even now as he approaches 60. Pat was a quiet, thoughtful kind of person, someone who would usually say hello have a quiet few words with you and a quiet laugh and then spend some time thinking over what had just passed. Give him the chance to talk about one of his favoured subjects however and the man would suddenly burst into animated discussion and debate on the topic.

The friendship between any two people will never be quite like any other, I'm sure Pat was many different things to many different people, I'm sure there are people who had similar conversations with him as I did, and I am sure there are sides of the man that I simply never saw. To me this is what friendship is, something constructed from the points of view of those involved. The friendship I held with Pat centered on discussions of history, documentaries and those reality television/documentaries you often find on the Discovery or History channels, Ice Road Truckers and the likes. You see Pat was a sponge for knowledge, he consumed it voraciously, through the media of video, film, television and book. He always had something interesting to talk about, even if I just happened to bump into him in the street.

One of his favoured topics as far as I could tell was history, especially the history of martial arts and military history to an extent. His interest in history went beyond the well known names of Bruce Lee or Masaaki Hatsumi, he was interested in the minutiae, from the likes of Mas Oyama and his background and Korean ethnicity to details concerning certain battles that he found interesting, I'll be honest I fail to remember a lot of them now. He was animated and engaging when talking about these topics and he was capable of spotting connections between events and incidents that usually only get talked about at a research level.

Beyond these conversations our friendship was one that often took place as we waited for this or that, as we picked up someone when he was driving to or from classes and demonstrations, as we waited in his and Danny's living room for Danny to get his gear together to go. It was a friendship that happened mostly in the between times of life. This does not mean I will miss it or him any less.

Farewell Pat.

Don't make any plans!

Who remembers their first time GM'ing a game? I found it kind of terrifying. It was like laying myself bare, like I was all raw nerve endings and the slightest rub was going to be agony. I planned and planned and planned, I think I sunk about 20 hours into just planning that first game, I went into my first session of my first ever campaign with everything planned out, I mean everything.

This was my downfall. My plans fell apart at first contact with the other people at the table. It was a nightmare. See I had made a pretty fatal error in how I planned my adventure: I thought of it as *MY* adventure. I had not actually planned a roleplaying game, a share myth for myself and my friends to explore, I had planned a book I wanted to read to my players and that they got to make minor choices in, but choices that ultimately wouldn't affect the outcome. This isn't how I think roleplaying games should be played. Maybe you disagree, if you do it's fine, tell me why I'm wrong, I'll learn something.

I think this is probably pretty common for first time GMs. especially teenagers, but I don't have any backing evidence of this so I'll just present my experience as a sort of case study. I felt at the time that I had to provide a great epic story, something that mixed Conan, Druss, Lord of the Rings and at the time various Anime and JRPG cliches I had a love for. I though I had to craft this great baroque thing, this sprawling narrative into which the other player's characters would fit and become the heroes of the story. I had applied all that I knew about writing at the time, not very much then, only a little more now. My story had a beginning, middle and end, themes were lovingly hammered into place and concepts were primed for ramming.

Upon contact with my story the players decided to attach to some throwaway line about a city in the south that seemed interesting. It was just some fluff in the background I had pulled out of thin air, it had nothing to do with the story. So I laid down the railroad tracks and how. I think about it now and see the almost literal battle that was happening between my story and the much more interesting shared mythology that could have developed. I was proud and petulant, so I let the game die. I don't think I intellectualised it very much at the time, I think I just did what was pretty typical of teenage me, I took my ball and went home, without telling anyone. I never ran another session of that game. I was dejected and horrified by what had happened to my poor story.

In the end I ended up running my next game some 5 years later in University, I was covering for a friend who had been slated to run a very cool Ravenloft one-shot based on pirates. I took his game, and seeing as I didn't have a full grasp of his story or the ideas he was trying to present I just used it as a framework around which to allow the other players to play and for me to react to. This felt so much more natural, I had fun, the other players had fun, we shared a story in which the only survivor was the innocent and damaged young pirate who rowed out of the mists to his freedom. My friend's reaction to this? "I was not aiming for that at all, but it sounds cool" Cheers John, that one line set me up to GM again and again, it was pretty formative in the way I game.

So what's the point of all this? Well I guess if by some magic you're a starting GM and you're reading this, I would like to be so bold as to offer you the one piece of advice I would have loved to have heard when I started: Don't plan anything, react and build your myth collaboratively.

Maybe that’s two pieces of advice?

Sweetness

The weekend just past has been one of those so very, very busy weekends with lots of things to do both at home and with work commitments. I've got today off to get some things done at home, to spend a bit of time with the little ones and the likes, I also have one very quick thing to do for work, which I'm getting done while Ella is in school and Oliver is having an afternoon nap. Once I'm done writing here off course. Now I've sat down for this first time in about 72 hours without the intention of immediately going asleep!

All in all though it's not something I feel I can or even want to complain about, it's been a pretty good weekend. Visitors in work, showing off what we do. Family visits, my brother-in-law, one of my best friends and his lovely girlfriend, who is also quickly becoming one of my good friends after only a couple of visits. A small party on Saturday night for said brother-in-law's birthday, all without a hitch, a couple of pints beforehand. Sunday was spent doing a bit of window shopping with my wife, her brother and his girlfriend, she tried on some clothes in preparation for a wedding and hen party later in the year.

The point, I guess, of this ramble is to reflect in a positive way on the nice weekend and indeed all the positive things that go on in my life. Yes, absolutely we have problems and hiccups that we have to deal with, family members in dire straits that we are only equipped to help in the smallest ways at the moment. These problems seem much less dark and deadly when viewed in the light of the positives, the family days, watching my kids grow, my oldest two becoming young women, some family members getting past the harder times into something a bit better, good friends, a job that I enjoy and that provides enough for my family to get by on.

I also have plenty of things to look forward too this year, such as a wedding, a few trips for work, wedding anniversary, birthdays, a good friend coming home from Japan and a bachelor party in Hamburg. It’s going to be a busy kind of year and I’m looking forward to it. I’m feeling pretty good about this year all told, and I’m looking forward to everything to come.

Hmm this has all been a bit saccharine, oh well!

Important to me.

I listen to quite a few podcasts, in fact when I lost my phone just before Christmas I probably lamented the loss of all the podcasts I listened to on it more than the loss of a mode of contact. It took me us two months to have the spare cash to pick up a cheap phone to hold me over, but this cheap phone is still an Android and I once again have my podcasts back.

On Wednesday I listened to this particular Radiolab episode:

The Bitter End

I wish it had been there around December/January 2011/12. It would have given me some measure of comfort. Last year a very important person in my life died. My grandmother Elizabeth Smith, she was instrumental in me becoming who I am today. She lived with us throughout my life until I moved in with my then girlfriend and now wife. My mother was quite ill when I was a baby and my father was in the army in different part of the country until we moved to said area when I was just one year old. So my grandmother did a lot of looking after me when I was a baby, when I was colic-y and screaming, when my mother wasn't able to carry me due to a gallbladder problem. I developed a very deep bond with her.

My earliest memory in fact is of helping her to lay down a tablecloth across the kitchen table in one of our old houses. My childhood was spent in her small flat that was attached to the main house, watching old war movies or cartoons with her while I played with Lego on her floor. She was a wonderful, kind and caring woman, who spent time as a mental health nurse, ran a nursing home and eventually helped in raising me. To say that I love her doesn't do it justice.

January of last year she passed away as a result of, well now that I think about it I can't make the exact details of her passing stick, my brain slides around the subject still. What is concrete in my head is that it was slow, around the time I hit university, maybe a couple of years in, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she later developed Parkinson's, she eventually began to lose the power to swallow and while she remembered a lot towards the end one of the worst experiences of my life was a day when she could not remember who I was at all, confusing me with her own son John. It very nearly killed me. As a result of losing the power to swallow she landed up being fed by something called a PEG feeding tube. Eventually she asked that she no longer be kept alive this way. She passed away a couple of weeks later maybe, having spent an afternoon with my children, my wife, some of my cousins and my mother & aunt. A last family get together in the hospital room that I missed due to work, she wasn't completely aware I'm told.

At the time that she was taken off the PEG feeding I was so conflicted, it ended up being my mother's decision and she asked my opinion on the matter. I knew my Nan wanted to have it end but this way seemed cruel somehow. If I had heard that particular podcast at the time I feel the decision would have been, not easier, but maybe less conflicting? I'm not sure. This is still hard for me to think about. Writing it down is worse. I think there is a case here for quality of life versus prolonging the mechanical act of living. My point I guess is that this podcast in particular has offered me a little bit of comfort, maybe that's not the right word either. Anyway, I urge you to listen to it.

It's got something important to say.

Rules of the Game

I've said before that I'm a big fan of games, pen and paper roleplaying games are my game of choice, though boardgames run a very close second. I've run through my gaming history before so I won't do it again here, I'll get sick of hearing myself speak on the same things. Recently I've made a somewhat seismic shift in how I play roleplaying games in terms of being a PC and a GM.

It started about 18 months ago when I started listening to two podcasts, the first is The Walking Eye and the second is The Jank Cast. Up until I started listening to these casts I had played in an almost completely mechanical sort of way, nothing wrong with this per se but it wasn't what I nor what my regular group of friends and gamers were looking for. We were playing all sort of different games, mostly of the non-indie and non-story driven variety, but we were always looking for a good story. Now I have to say that two of the regular GMs in our gaming group are masters of the epic yarn, very good with prep and great a weaving our characters into the narrative of the prep they've done. They're really great at working with the awful wrenches PCs tend to throw into plans as well. A third GM I've only had the pleasure of playing in a couple of her games but she's exceptional at building atmosphere into her scenarios through lots of research and prep beforehand.

Despite my relatively academic nature I suck at prep for roleplaying games, I've always found that the more I prep the more stilted a session will feel, I also suck at weaving big stories for people to inhabit. My strength has usually been in dealing with unexpected ideas and letting players take the lead, introducing and reintroducing vague overarching antagonists for my group. I've always felt more comfortable with this sort of GM style, I also used to love simulationist-ish games as well or gamist games with lots of balance. My need for emergent story and my love for these sorts of rulesets didn't gel overly well. I GM'ed my share of 3.x D&D and 4e, I liked the combat in 4e quite a lot in fact, but I couldn't do the prep necessary for these games to float. I GM'ed a Planescape game using Mutants and Masterminds 2e with the Warriors and Warlocks content, it worked sort of but I ended up letting it slide away, much to the chagrin of the people playing in it (sorry by the way).

Then through the above mentioned podcasts I found two pretty awesome games, the first being The Dresden  Files game using FATE, where your background and history inform the themes of the game, the group work together on world building and your traits as a character can be compelled in game to affect them. I thought this was awesome! The whole game works toward weaving a narrative inside the themes that you as a group build. Neat stuff this, but the prep side brought me down again, I love playing this game but running it doesn't really fall in my skillset as a GM, one of the other regular GMs has it down though, his game is great!

The other game and indeed system I suppose is Apocalypse World and the attached engine, basically zero prep beyond a few between game notes, pickup in an evening and begin playing inside an hour and importantly the rules and role of the GM are defined in such a way as to be an engine of creation for emergent story. The shift for me has been from trying to balance and simulate to simply pushing and prodding players into making the story for themselves. This game has already produced what have been some of the most memorable moments of GM'ing for me. I'll probably do a post on those moments later this week in fact. 

I've run over word count by quite a bit...

Monday Ramblings

I think disliking Monday is one of those fundamental rights, I just can't seem to ever dislike it though. I kind of like Mondays most of the time, in fact I would say I like or dislike Mondays just as often as I like or dislike any other day of the working week. When I hit I day that just seems to simultaneously drag, not have enough hours in the day and keeps throwing up problem after problem to fix, those days that have what I think is the feel of the traditional Monday Blues kind of Monday that TV loves to tell us about, then I think of that day as a Monday sort of day.

I'm thinking about my research a lot at the moment, when the room is quiet and nobody is talking to me directly my thoughts become filled with all sort of ideas, mostly right now to do with literature reviews and philosophies of research. My lit review has to cover two key areas definitely in the form of Digital Education (specifically online learning, virtual learning environments and webinar type things) and Gifted & Talented education, I probably have to cover Assessment and Evaluation as well, but I'll see how that pans out. Each of these areas is pretty damn big and there are some seminal works that I really need to bone up on.

There's also my leadership assignment as well to think about, I have to pull together an interview schedule, read a few more books on leadership and get some data together for this assignment. I feel, personally, that this will be the weakest of my assignments for this year. Leadership as a field of study is so unbelievably subjective, there are as many theories as there are researchers in the field, plus som researchers have different theories dependent upon the context of the leaders position. It's all very confusing, it's the only area of my Ed. Doc. that makes me pine for the simpler days of physics, with fairly definitive methods to approaching a given problem.

See I've made a shift of sorts in taking up both my current position in work and indeed in taking up my Ed. Doc. studies. I came from a very much empirical background, grounded in Experimental Physics, I went all the way to the masters level in the field. Something felt missing though, I was casting around for ideas for a Ph.D. or even to become a post-primary teacher, but research in science and teaching in the mainstream education system didn't feel right. I had a couple of sputtering runs at getting myself into a couple of different Ph.D. positions, one in Climate Science another in Nanotechnology, but I called off at the last minute.

The financial collapse and start of the recession here left me with a lot of time on my hands as I only had occasional employment as a tutor in the Centre for Talented Youth. This lead me eventually to an admin job there as well as teaching and now I'm sort of a self-taught IT support guy for them, as well as all the other hats I wear. My views now have changed somewhat from the simplistic "Science is King" approach I had always had, I still think that in the fields of medicine, physical sciences and some others that the scientific method is the way to go absolutely, but in the fields of education and social studies I've taken a more pragmatic "right tool for the job" approach, people and their feelings are messy, their interactions are messy too, numbers will only tell me so much, a pointer to what questions I need to ask and if I want to ask questions of people I need to ask them, face to face to get their voice. That's important.

Funny how life works out.

It's a Start

So, I’ve often thought about this whole blogging thing. Like very often. I always say to myself I should start it on Monday or next month, then I get to thinking about what I could write? Why would people want to listen to what I have to say? What do I have to offer? Today, as I was reflecting upon things on my morning commute, I suddenly realised that I was thinking about this the wrong way. Why should I be trying to offer anything to anyone? Why should I worry about what I can write about and if it’s interesting? I came to a decision: I’ll just write about things I find interesting, I won’t write some sort of column blog or try to pick a theme or anything else. Instead I’ll just write for me, sounds selfish but why shouldn’t I use this as a place to reflect? If anyone reads it and writes a comment maybe it will offer me a new perspective, why shouldn’t I just get something out of this for myself?

So here it is, after what is probably the better part of six months of having this blog set up and waiting, idling, taken up space on the internet and not doing anything with it, here’s my first 500 or so words. I’m going to keep a journal here, of my thoughts, what’s happening in my life and maybe, hopefully, a bit of reflection that will lead to positive changes.

I’m a pragmatist, in the philosophical sense. The value or worth of something like an idea or an object is described in the consequences of believing in or using that something. Let’s see what the consequences of this blog will be for me and what its value to me will be as well.

I think I should start by taking a little inventory about myself, what do I think about myself and how do I think about myself, maybe I’ll look back on this at some point in the future and see improvements. Maybe not.

 So here goes, two things I like about myself:

• I am a father and husband, possibly not the world’s greatest, probably not the world’s worst. I make mistakes but I try. I love them in a way I simply can’t put words to.
• I am flexible, I can learn quickly by doing, I improve the way I do things with each iteration of doing it. I thrive in chaos, things do not need to be neat and orderly for me to work, this works well with my wife who is very orderly, she brings structure to our family, I help deal with the unexpected.

Two things I’m not so pleased about

• I am not entirely comfortable with my body, I am usually quite comfortable with it but I think I would like it to be a little bit stronger, a little bit slimmer.
• I’m not the world’s best manager of time, I sometimes become focussed on something to the exclusion of other things, or procrastinate when I’m stressed. Maybe this will keep me on track?

Ok, it’s a start.