Uh...

When I started this blog, I was chock full of vim. Packed to the brim with pep. I was sure that the momentum I had gathered in the Blasted Lands would carry me through to 60. I was sure that the 50s would all be a blur of instances, grinding, and battlegrounds. Well, I didn't count on one thing: my astounding caprice.

As has happened multiple times in my WoW career (geez, does it ever sound wrong to say that!), I've momentarily lost the desire to play. Here's how my cycle seems to go: I get obsessively committed to WoW and spend every free moment either reading web articles and fora about it or in Azeroth itself, then I burn myself out and completely lose interest, then I spend a significant amount of time sort of half-assedly playing, then suddenly experience another interest spike, and we're off to the races again. It's been this way since my first day in game: I lost the all-consuming dedication to playing that drove me to buy my own retail copy of WoW long before the expiration of my trial account within hours of creating my long-term account.

The reasons for this cycle are too numerous and subtle for me to completely understand, but, near as I can tell, the main factors are:

• The ADD-ish tendencies shared by most people in my profession
• The OCD-ish cyclical tendencies shared by most people in my profession
• The fact that I don't actually enjoy interacting with other players all that much and periodically just want to play by myself (which drives me back to my PS2 or Xbox)
• Alts get interesting
• Real-life events intervene

The last one doesn't contribute to my mood swings re: WoW, but it often forces the lull in my cycle to come early. I've been lucky that my WoW habit hasn't yet affected my professional life (and I'm in a vocational situation that requires a lot of off-the-clock, at-home solo work). Of course, it's affected my social life (in that I generally don't feel obligated to arrange social events when I have a perfectly lovely way to spend every evening calling to me from my laptop). That real life tends to come ahead of WoW in my priorities means that I sometimes fall out of the habit of playing. Probably the worst such incident took place in the holiday season last year. A combination of increased vocational responsibilities and travel to places that only had dial-up led me to basically not play at all for over a month. Sure, I logged in to restart auctions, but I never ventured outside of Ironforge.

That particular lull also hit one of my friend/colleagues rather hard, effectively breaking her of the habit of logging in at all. This still troubles her: I haven't seen her in game since November, and some items I've mailed to her have been returned to me more than half a dozen times. She readily admits that she hasn't really played in eight months, but I'm inclined to believe her when she says it's because she forgets to play (why else would she still be paying $15/month for a game she doesn't play?). She's still stuck in the low 20s, but I and another friend/colleague are determined to coax her back into regular play.

Anyway, I'm choosing to blame my current lull on a combination of a job-related situation that I've been dealing with for the last several weeks and the unholy heat that's been afflicting our fair city lately. It's utter horseshit, of course; my recent WoW-manic phase started during the most time-consuming and stressful portion of my professional situation, and the lull came in the middle of the easier part. But I'm blaming the job thing because it will be over in a week, and I'm hoping to fool myself into another bout of WoW hyperactivity.

Anyway, my WoW activity for the past couple of weeks has been all but nil, and it will probably continue this way for the near future. Part of the reason I think this will continue is that I've come to realize that much to most of my WoW time from here on out really needs to be spent running instances (maybe I'll post on my abysmal dungeon experiences later), and I've never really enjoyed them. Whatever. I'm almost certainly not going to accomplish my goal of hitting 60 before September (since dungeons have been XP black holes for me so far), but I'm still hoping to get there before the Burning Crusade is released.

I know absolutely nobody reads this, and thus nobody cares, but posts will be light here until I get my, um, groove back.