Apologies for the potentially exploitive title. I am not resigning from Cellar Door or X11 anytime soon. However, I had an experience this week that prompted me to examine the "healthy" process of letting things go.
This week, I was released (a great word) from a responsibility that has been a chore for the past couple of years. I love being a professor, because I love my subject matter (the Earth Sciences), and I love interacting with students. In contrast, I hate committee and service work. Professors are incapable of doing anything efficiently. I will write this presser in a few sentences below, to show you this penchant for wordiness first hand.
I feel that the key to determining when to say "I am done" is the presence or absence of joy. If you enjoy something, then hold on to it. If the experience has lost its luster, then leave it for somebody else, who may enjoy it and thus do it better, so that you can go on to something else that you will enjoy, and thus do better than the poor soul who was doing it before you.
The problem with professing for a living is that you grow to enjoy the sound of your own voice or the style of your own writing. Because of this, you are a burden on any person who is tasked with actually doing something that includes you.
Want to go to lunch? A normal person has a limited time for lunch and will make a decisive call, just to get sat down and to the business of eating. Professors will debate the pro's and con's of different places until most of the time allotted for lunch has been wasted. Worse still, they will spend lunch debating the lunch they are currently eating, and then spend the time after lunch debating it further.
As a former Marine, this process of time wasting infuriates me to no end. Thankfully, one of the committees that I have been serving on these past two years has decided they have had enough of my decisive, "just fucking do something" tendencies and have allowed me to resign. This comes at a perfect time, because there are tons of things that I would rather be doing.
To translate this to X11, I would like to apply this to teamhopping. Which according to the legendary audub, "is for the weak". To teamhop is a much maligned activity amongst the X11 community. But I think it is unfair to enforce our morality on another, particularly when their resigning from a team, or league, comes from that loss of joy that I described above.
This doesn't excuse the stripping of a team for its resources and then leaving a wasteland behind. Nor does it condone the mentality that winning is the only joy in X11, and the minute the team has peaked, its time to move along to something better. But it does recognize that in the end, this, like most recreational activities, is supposed to be fun. So when it isn't, we should embrace the process of moving on, or calling it quits, whether that be for a team, a league, or the entire game.
Enough pontificating for one presser. Let's close with the results of the final Cassino-Cellar Door match. We won handily and the obvious difference, is that my team is still 2-3 bars better for match performance, so any contest will remain somewhat lopsided. That said, I feel we won the tactical battle both games this season. I won MotR for both matches, and somewhat evened the tally after last season, where Henry schooled me tactically, despite the relatively even results. As I said last week, I can't wait for his team to develop into the behemoth that he has planned. Rivalries are best when the teams are evenly matched.
See you next week,
Q
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