A Great Deal

My life is Fruit Punch, a tasty blend of this and that when mixed together create a smooth, refreshing blend of all kinds of stuff. I'm still unemployed, and that sucks, but life and games move on ever so. I have another toon at 80, hooray, and even though there's not much time till Cata I'm having fun with him.

Even my son has an 80 toon, which he loves to PvP with. But just last night he shared a desire to make some gold and level his professions more before the expansion but he doesn't exactly have the time to do it. So, how to solve this?

He as desires, and I need help too. So, I made a deal with my kid. I will farm with his toon and run one heroic per day, in return he will use his strong arms and legs to massage my back and neck for 5 minutes every night. For those of you new to my blog, I have a bad back injury, and have had it now for more than two and a half years. My muscles get tight as a result of the damage in my spine, and working out the knots is good for my health.

So, he agreed. Now he gets something that he wants, and I get something that I really need help with daily. To be fair to my kid, he often offers to scratch my arms or rub my neck, but that only once a week, if that. This is a mutually beneficial trade for the next month, something I believe will truly work out well for the two of us.

Of all you people out there, some are single and some are not. I don't believe that any have made deals like I made with my son, but I suppose it's possible. But what other deals have you made? Do you offer to clean the kitchen and take out the garbage if your "special someone" allows you to raid for three hours on Thursday night instead of two? Do you trade days of the week for time spent? Do you pay people in your family to leave you alone? I don't know, there are infinite possibilities I suppose, but I wonder what sorts of deals that other people make? And how far do those deals cross over into real life?

Deal making is a tricky business sometimes, I've tried to make deals with my family before and some didn't really turn out to be successful ones. But I think this latest deal is a great one, and I look forward to nightly knots being undone in my back, while he looks forward to a chest of gold and high level professions!

Playing With Pain

If you don't like it when people mix their personal lives with their wow blogging, then come by for a visit on another day and I'll do my best to make you happy. Today is definately not that day.

I believe so much of ourselves is revealed through the games we play I cannot, in good conscience, ignore the interplay between the two at times.

For those who have not followed me long, know that I suffer from a mix of genetic and injury related back pain. Genetic is bad enough, but when an injury targets what genetics already fails at, the compounding consequence is often very difficult to live with.

I have no idea how I hold down a job, but every night when I get home I load myself with pain killers, get into a comfortable chair, and begin my gaming night. It's a real solace and can often help me get away from a world that not only can't offer solutions to my unique pain, but also deny me the healthcare that could have any hope of providing some measure of relief (seriously, I hate insurance companies).

But there are nights when my pain meds don't work very well and I'm left to my willpower to get me through the raid. Saturday night was one of those night, but my guild never knew it. When I'm in pain it's omnipresent, I can't avoid that. Being a healer in many of the ICC fights I have to be super alert, super aware of the mechanics of the raid as well as my healing duties in keeping those pesky health bars as full as possible.

Dispite the pain we were able to manage to get past a particularly troublesome fight for our casual guild and continued our progression into ICC. Our guild leader wasn't with us, for whatever reason I don't know (he was on, he just didn't want to go). So I took the healing lead. I had to teach our new Pali healer all the fights and coordinate everything from a healing standpoint. This responsibility helped drown out some of the pain, I'm not sure I could have endured if I wasn't forced to speak up and lead so much.

Maybe this is a great thing, I'm sure it is. I play to help me forget my pain, yet there are times when my pain keeps me from playing at the top of my game. Perhaps then this is the secret, to keep my mind so occupied with thinking and leading and directing that my pain can somehow fall into the background.

At the end of it all I could barely stand up from the chair, but as a guild we had progressed. So in the end it was a proverbial "good and bad" thing.

I live with some comfort knowing that another guildie of mine suffers something similar, we can empathize with each other. I can only imagine how he feels yet he too never says a word about it. People play this game and many others with weights on their lives that at times seem insupportable. But guess what? You are not alone. I know that only too well. Just because nobody in your guild is going through what you are, doesn't mean there is nobody.

I'm lucky, very lucky to have met somebody that can truly understand what I suffer through. I know that not everyone will. But I guarantee you that someone in the world does, so take comfort in knowing that somewhere, somebody knows what it's like to play with pain - whatever kind of pain that is.

Stay strong!

That's Sick!

What I hate about a cold is how foggy it can make you feel. You don't see straight, things can get blurry or fuzzy or you feel dizzy and need to get back into bed. What I hate more than having a cold myself is when a supervisor or manager gets one and they still come to work. I can only figure that it's a statement of toughness and of their inner drive to "get the job done" that they are showing off.

To me they are crazy, all it does is reinforce a social belief that you SHOULD, nay you MUST work while sick, otherwise you're nothing but the lazy person in the office who shows weakness at the first signs of adversity. "You are not management material because you stay home when you are sick, loser."

So what about raiding? Do people give any slack to somebody who is obviously sick and doesn't have all their mental faculties available to them? The other night while doing the weekly raid with a few guildies and some pugged players, we had some trouble because there were two people who were really, really sick. Just so happens that it was the main tank and his healer (me).

I can't say who was in a greater fog, but I'm not sure it mattered. He kept forgetting to use certain abilities that enable tanks to, well, tank. And I was so out of it I never even noticed I was in the fire until I couldn't cast anymore..."Hey, I died, how did that happen?"

The run was a failure, and DPS types were talking to us over vent as if we were complete idiots. We apologized and said that we just needed to get off and let everyone else find a way to succeed without us.

I felt so bad, but also angry. I guess raiding has become a business, or just a job, where there is no mercy shown to those who get sick and no allowed time off without attaching a social stigma to those persons.

Let me phrase my question this way: Are you cold blooded or do you have a heart?

I'm curious. My own experience tells me that many are unforgiving, but my experience is narrow and only mine. What about you? Would you show your understanding or rail against the sickos in cold-blood?