I’ve never been good at role-playing games. Scratch that — I’ve never had much interest in role-playing games. Wait, scratch that, too — I’ve had interest in role-playing games, but not so much with the role playing itself.

Sure, like many introverted, awkward, socially inept teenagers in the 1980s, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. I know lots of people of that sort who played RPGs as a method of getting some healthy and fun social interaction with people who didn’t want to torture and ridicule them for being introverted, awkward and socially inept, but for me… well, it wasn’t all that “social” since it was just me and my friend Mitch. We’d take turns being the Dungeon Master. Neither one of us played D&D for the game’s role-playing aspects; for us, it was just the combat and advancing our characters so they could kick more ass in combat.

(Mitch decided he’d had it with playing D&D with me when, at the very outset of an adventure, I ambushed his character he’d been playing for a few weeks and killed him…with a band of pixies. (No, not “the band The Pixies” — that would actually have been less embarrassing, I think. Getting whacked by a murderous Black Francis would have a certain angsty poetry to it.))

Anyway, my point was that even when I played role-playing games, I didn’t really role play. I was always too self-conscious to really get into that part of the game — even when it’s the friggin’ point of said game. Even the last time I tried, just a few years ago, in a game populated completely by people I trusted (including my wife), I still couldn’t let myself go enough to pretend to be someone else.

Every time I play a computer RPG where I get to design my character’s appearance, I always end up just making myself, trying to come as close as I can to putting myself into the game. Even in these games where The Real Me is completely hidden to the other players online, I still stick with being a pixelated version of me.

When I first started playing The Sims 2, I enthusiastially constructed my entire family, including the kids…and then horrified Terry when Sims Social Services came to take the girls away because I wasn’t feeding them. (The baby seat was sitting right in between the kitchen table and the refrigerator, situated just so my Sims couldn’t pull the baby chair out far enough to put the kids in. For all their bitching about hungry kids, “Allen” and “Terry” couldn’t tell me why they wouldn’t/couldn’t feed them. I’d have hoped that these simluated versions of me and my wife would be smart enough to move the friggin’ chair, but no. Of course, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out until after my children had been placed in foster care, so maybe the game’s more realistic than I might think…?)

I usually tell myself that the reason I couldn’t get into role-playing was because I was just too happy being myself to want to be someone else. And while it’s true that I am damn glad to be me, it’s obvious that excuse is pure horse manure. What it is exactly, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s quite fear in this case; I have a feeling, though, that it’s connected at some fundamental level to my traditional lack of Deep Thoughts about the world around me. The term Terry likes to use for me is “solipsistic,” or self-referential — I get so wrapped up in my own head that I Am All There Is.

The funny thing, though, is that I feel like I can get into other people’s heads pretty well, both when trying to suss out people’s motivations for what they’re doing — or when writing fiction. So I know my solipsism isn’t for a lack of ability to understand or inhabit other roles or personas, but rather from a lack of desire or need to do so. And I think that’s something else that needs to change in my head. I think know that I need to expand my metaphorical wardrobe, to try some different outfits on, because I think know that doing so will help make me a better writer…and a better person.

I know that some many of you reading this post are veteran RPGers or otherwise into Being Someone Else, so clue me in: what do you get out of it? What do you put into it? Does Being Someone Else for awhile have any effect on Being Yourself?

The rational part of my brain by far dwarves that part of my brain which is open to things-not-easily-explained. I’m far more Scully than Mulder: my first reaction to hearing stories about phenomena which fall outside of the realm of the basic laws of the universe as laid down in high-school science textbooks is to scoff dismissvely at whatever out-there bit of New Age hooey is under discussion. I reailze that this isn’t the most open-minded attitude I could have (I attribute said attitude to my apparently very sheltered upbringing), and I’m working on being more open to that which isn’t considered part of “normal” science, especially since so many of my friends — incredibly intelligent people I admire and respect quite a bit — believe so strongly in some of this stuff. If these folks believe in $x, I say to myself, then there’s got to be something to it.

I’m saying all of that as a way into this: I’m not sure how much I believe in coincidence, and I’m trying to notice when it feels like the universe is attempting to tell me something… even if I can’t immediately suss out just what.

Case in point:

Friday night, Terry and I were watching a program on the Travel Channel about (coincidentally enough) places which are supposedly hotspots for mystical or paranormal energy. One of the mystically intense locales featured on the show was Sedona, Arizona, and there among the footage of Sedona was a very interesting-looking church, one that I believe had been built into the rocks in the mountains. (It was only mentioned and shown in passing, so I didn’t get the full story.) That church itself isn’t important to my story except in that it sparked some neurons in my brain: “Hmmm,” the thought generated by the firing of those neurons said, “your dad told you a story about some church out in the Southwest that had a spiral staircase that had some funky properties to it. I wonder if that’s it?”

And that was all I thought of the matter.

Until a few mintues ago, when I was listening to an Internet radio station I’d never listened to before.

Instead of listening to my usual MP3s while writing, I decided to listen to the radio instead, and pulled a station at random out of iTunes: iChannel, which plays all indie and unsigned bands, so I knew I’d hear some new stuff. Well, after the third song I heard, a DJ (female voice, cute and just slightly less-than-professional-sounding) came on to introduce the next song, which had been specially requested by Sarah from Santa Fe.

“Have you ever been to Santa Fe?” asks the DJ. “They’ve got this church there, and it’s got this spiral staircase in it that’s made without any nails at all. It’s just boards. Pretty cool… you should check it out if you’re ever in Santa Fe. Anyway, here’s the request for Sarah…”

That was the church and the staircase my dad had told me about.

Coinicdence that I should see a TV show about mystical energies and unexplainable pheomena that makes me think about something I hadn’t thought of in years, something about which I couldn’t quite remember the details, and then have those details filled in 48 hours later by a DJ on a radio station I’d never even heard of before? Most likely, yeah… but it also feeds into something else which had been on my mind since Thursday: opening my mind to these sorts of connections and letting either the universe or my subconcious, take your pick, send me messages or information it thinks I need.

(What message am I supposed to be taking from the story of the Loretto Chapel? I’m honestly not sure. Since I’m not a religious person, I’m going to ignore the “miraculous” apsects of the staircase’s construction. I’m thinking I should be getting a message about design or building, or perhaps about seeing a project through to completion. Possibly that I should become a nun, though that seems unlikely.)

These sorts of coincidences have happened to me many times in my life. I have no idea if they’re a more or less common occurrence for me than for other people, or even if I’m more of less aware of them. I know that as impressive as this most recent coincidence feels, it’s far from the biggest that’s ever popped up; sometime soon I’ll tell you about my friend Steve and how I knew he was supposed to be part of my life.

So what about all of you? I’d love to hear about any similar experiences you might have had and what, if any, meaning you ascribed to them.

According to CNN and Money magazine, I’ve got the best job in America. Well, not me personally — that job seems to belong to the Mark Dochtermann, the Director of Technology at Electronic Arts. But my job in general, software engineer — apparently, I could have no better job, according to the fine people at CNN and Money.

And honestly, I think I have to agree with them. Whether or not software engineering is empirically “the best job” or not (and I think we all know that these sorts of reports are all essentially horseshit), it’s the best job right now for me, which is really all I care about.

I’ve known this for awhile, of course. It’s one of the reasons why, for better or for worse, I haven’t been pursuing the writing thing with every fiber of my being: I like being a programmer, and I especially like being a web programmer. This isn’t something I’m doing until I find something better — programming is the “something better” that I came to following a lowly-paid and ill-respected stint as a web designer.

(This seems like a good place to discuss the difference between “web designer” or “web developer” and “software engineer,” at least as those words have pertained to my career. So many people, my family included (or perhaps “my familiy in particular”), have absolutely no idea what it is that I do. Everyone assumes I’m a designer or that I do, oh I dunno, data entry or something.

Technically speaking, I’m not an engineer in the most political sense of the word: I don’t have a degree in computer science, I have almost zero formal training in any programming disciplines, I don’t have any certifications to speak of. I’m all experience and no education. My current job title is “Senior Web Developer.” But I have a problem with that title — and haven’t been shy about letting my bosses know about it, for all the good it’s done — because “web developer” is what I did when I first started in this industry seven years ago. I developed websites: I did the design, I built out the HTML and maybe wrote a little JavaScript (or cribbed it from some other site). What I did as a “web developer” certainly wasn’t programming, and I don’t believe that title usually implies any sort of programming ability or background.

The problem, though, is that I’m not sure what a more appropriate titlewould be. The term “engineer” sounds so much better to my ears (and looks so much better on the resumé), but it’s not especially accurate, given the lack of credentials I mentioned above. My father was an electical engineer, and for that he was required to be licensed in whichever state he was employed. So no matter the kind of work I’m doing, I’m not sure there’s any way I’m qualified to use the word “engineer.”

But what I do now, whether my title indicates it or not beyond the fact that the word “senior” is in it, is software engineering. I’m not a designer (except on the side, just for fun). I’m not an HTML monkey, though I can monkey around with HTML like nobody’s business. What I do is work on — architect, design, document, code — the enormous application framework which powers all of our company’s websites as well as communicates with a number of our other back-end application servers. That includes code written in multiple programming languages (though primarily PHP) and a whole lot of MySQL database work.

It’s not all me, by any means (in fact, my good buddy Brian has been more responsible for the overall system architecture than I), but it’s certainly a whole lot me. And “web developer” just doesn’t feel like a fitting title for all of that. It’s kind of like calling an NFL wide reciever a “runner” — yeah, okay, that’s true, but it’s only part of it — a receiver does so much more than just run. (Well, most do, anyway.)

Okay. Rant over.)

Software engineering stretches my brain in happy-making ways — one of the things I like to think I’m best at is problem solving, and that’s what software engineering is all about. It’s overall a pretty low-pressure gig for me <knocks on all the wood he can find>. I get to work with people of a temperament similar to mine and who have interests similar to mine. And the job pays pretty damn well. I can’t think of very many jobs I’d rather have than the one I’ve already got; even those careers where I think I might better like the work itself don’t pay as well (or are phenomenally difficult to break into), and at this stage of my life, money’s still necessarily something of a priority. My job fits me well.

I love what I do. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.

So I’m 35 today. I have to say that so far, 35 doesn’t feel all that different from 34, but then again, it really doesn’t feel all that much different from 27.

Thirty-five seems like a good time to do some stock-taking, being that whole midpoint-of-the-decade thing. For me, unsurprisingly, this comes down to evaluating my career and creative pursuits — I mean, I’m extraordinarily happy; I’m pretty healthy (the diabetes is under control); I have a fantastic family and wonderful friends, both local and spread throughout the country; I have a job that I like well enough for now and has potential to make me even happier. There’s truly no point in my life previous to this that I would trade for right now.

So yeah, the future directions of the career and the writing are really the big things dominating my mid-decade thoughts. I’m not sure exactly where either is going, but I think I’ve finally made some peace with the fact that it’s doubtful I’ll be supporting myself with writing anytime soon — and honestly, I’m not sure I even want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all saying that I don’t want to write anymore — in fact, I think I want to do it more than ever — but I’m releasing myself from the constricting notion that I had to A Writer. I’m okay with thinking of writing the same way I do drawing and photography and playing guitar and piano: it’s something I really enjoy doing and something I want to get better at, but it doesn’t have to be This Big Thing. Writing’s still sitting a few steps higher than those other pursuits (it certainly does have much more income and prestige potential than any of the others), but I’m just trying to take the pressure off — longtime readers and friends probably know I’ve always tended to put unreasonable expectations on myself with regards to the writing thing.

None of that is to say I’m not taking the writing seriously, or that I don’t want to publish. It’s just an acknowledgement that for the time being, it has to take second place to The Work What Pays and will do so for several more years. And that’s 100% OK.

I’ve realized that I’m pretty lucky: I have a current job and career that I like, one I’d like to pursue more seriously. I enjoy doing what I do and it pays pretty well (with the potential to pay really well if I get better and better at it). It takes care of my family and allows Terry to stay home with the kids. And it allows me to work on my writing and get a bi-weekly paycheck without feeling like my soul is being char-grilled. I’ve known (or know of) too many people for whom it’s an either-or situation.

Furthermore (and this might be the topic of future posts) — there’s potential there for me to combine the writing and the current career. More on that later, perhaps.

Anyway, that’s some of what’s going on in my head. I’m sorry I haven’t been posting more often lately — things have just been a little bit nutty, both at work and at home. (I’ve actually been — gasp — working while I’m at work. Well, not so much today, but hey, it’s my birthday.) Do you people know that I actually feel guilt when I go too long without posting? I do, I swear.

Seven years ago today, Terry and I were supposed to get our marriage license. Instead, we got married.

I left work at lunchtime so I could go pick Terry up and we could drive to the county courthouse and register for the license. As I was getting ready to leave, my friend Scott said to me: “I don’t want you to come back here tomorrow married or anything.”

“Heh, yeah, right–don’t worry, that’s not gonna happen,” I said.

But on the thirty-minute drive to downtown Pensacola to pick up Terry at work, I started to think about it. Why couldn’t we just get married? We were planning on eloping the following Saturday.anyway But surely there’s no way Terry would go for that, right? We had our ceremony all planned out: nice sunset ceremony on the beach, just us and the official and one witness, Terry in a beautiful white dress she’d bought for the occasion…

I proposed the idea anyway, though I didn’t seriously think she’d consider it. And at first, she didn’t. “We can’t do that!” she said. “We–we have plans! And a dress!”

The more she thought about it, though, and the more we talked about it, the better an idea it sounded. We drove around an extra hour discussing it and discussing it some more. And when we got to the courthouse and finally filled out the paperwork for the license, we told them we wanted to get married while we were there.

After waiting in the lobby for half-an-hour or so, a Justice of the Peace took us into a dim, empty stairwell. Terry and I held hands, she not in her white dress but in jeans and Birkenstocks, as the justice read the standard non-demoninatioal ceremonial vows, and then, just like that, we were married.

We left the courthouse a little stunned and a lot ecstatic. We had known we weren’t going to be able to have a big wedding–there was just no money to be had for a lavish ceremony (or even a not-so-lavish ceremony) and our parents were spread across the Eastern seaboard. We went over to my dad’s house and told him by subtly leaving our wedding-ringed fingers out for him to see; we called Terry’s mom and my mom. Everyone was happy for us, and if anyone was angry about out not having a big to-do, then they certainly hid it well.

I don’t regret the way we got married at all. Some people spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on their weddings, yet we’re every bit as married as they are. I don’t begrudge anyone their big weddings–if that’s what you want, that’s cool with me. But the ceremony itself wasn’t what was important to us; what the the ceremony meant was.

Terry, seven years and two beautiful children later, I’m still every bit as much in love with you as I was then. We’re on an amazing and occasionally challenging journey together, you and I, and while I don’t know exactly where it will lead, I do know that having you at my side (or above or under me or wherever) makes the journey worthwhile. These last seven years have gone by far more quickly than I would have imagined possible, but they’ve easily been the best seven years of my life. I love you, baby.