maskormenace | [Text] Planning?

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[Text] Planning?

Hey so. How do you make long-term plans? Not goals, but plans. How do you decide what they should be? And by long term I don't mean two or three years, that's actually not that hard when you have an idea of what you're currently able to do and how you can contribute. I mean ten years. That seems like a really, really long time to me, since, uh. I didn't have a very long life expectancy.

Looking for any advice here, because I never actually thought that far past taking down the cult I was in, and then finding my way to another world. The short term is easy, and unchanging - add value in whatever ways I can. But the long term is a whole different beast, and not one I can understand.

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that's easy i don't

That's fair enough. How's that working out so far?And are you planning on staying here or looking forward to going back to your world?

oh i wanna go back

back there i know what i'm doing

If you plan to go back, making roots here probably is the opposite thing you want to do then, right?

I'm the sort who wants to stay here, but I can relate to that. I like it here, but sometimes the lack of knowing what to do is frustrating.

right i'm bored out of my skull

can there be more invasions please

what's the point

I mean. I'm hoping to stay here for however long I live if at all possible. I probably can't continue to be a part-time waitress for the next ten years. And really, I don't want to. It's great for while I get used to this world, but customer service is just practice for normal human interaction in my mind, so once I've gotten what I need out of the job I want to try for something that's a little challenging. Or at least has fewer men my father's age making unwanted comments about my body. Actually, fewer men in general making unwanted comments about my body would be nice in general.

It's absolutely possible for me to be ported out any second, sure. But I want to stay here, and it wouldn't be very useful to me if I just continued on as I am indefinitely. I'd get bored, if nothing else.

quitting your shitty job doesn't require a 10 year plan

No, but depending on what job I pick up next, I might need to go through special training, or even college. Though, probably not college. It's not like I'm going to be a doctor or a scientist. Sticking your hand in someone's guts gets boring, I'm sure. There might also be having to work my way up a skill ladder. Which might mean planning.

There's also stuff like, I dunno. Going to live somewhere else eventually. I don't see myself moving out of the supplied housing any time soon, because honestly I don't care and I have never owned anything I couldn't carry in my backpack. But maybe some day that would be needed due to career requirements.

I'm sure there's more to long term planning for having a life than just... Wander aimlessly and hope it all goes okay. Not that it wouldn't work for some people, but I need to be able to plan for how I get bored of things, and have no idea how that works on a scale greater than three years.

Hell, I'm only 16. Maybe my getting bored of things so quickly is because I'm young? Or maybe the more I learn, the more likely it is I'll get so much information in something that I'll get bored and move on to something completely different at a faster pace? I don't know! And I have no idea how to plan around that type of thing, because living to twenty seemed like a near-impossibility in my world, so I never even set out to learn.

in other words you're not actually the kind of person who should be making plans at all

just go out and do shit

I mean I go out and do shit. But that's short term stuff. Going out and petting dogs just because I feel like it isn't going to be something I can do as a job or anything like that. Though I'll fight anyone who tells me I have to stop petting dogs.

Making long term plans, especially vague ones, isn't going to stop me from just going out and do random things that seem fun or interesting, so I don't see the harm in both.

you said it yourself

you get bored

nothing's more boring than sticking to a plan

and any plan you make is going to go to complete shit anyway

Plans can be fun and fulfilling. If they're boring it means you made the wrong plan. Most of my plans have gone great as long as everyone did what was expected, and even sometimes when they didn't. It's just those plans lasted only a couple years. Ten years is a lot.

two years is a lot

two minutes can be a lot

your whole life can go upside down in two seconds

there's no point

Well yeah. I don't know if most people realise that, but I've got some experience in everything going upside down in seconds. It doesn't change the fact that having plans has always helped me, including sometimes keeping me from putting more in front of me than I can handle at one time.

if you put nothing in front of you then it'll never be too much to handle

If I put nothing in front of me, I'll have nothing to work toward. I don't think I've ever had a complete lack of something to work toward in my entire life, and the idea doesn't appeal to me.

suit yourself

[uh.

she's not going to directly respond to the I DIDN'T HAVE MUCH OF A LIFE EXPECTANCY but. ruby you deserve a helpful answer.]

I would say that at the end of each week, or each month, try and keep track of what things made you the happiest. Maybe it was spending time at a friend's house, or studying something at the library, or taking a long walk outside.

And then try to incorporate that more into your life. If you like reading about history on your own, there are free courses you can take, for example. Think about something you would enjoy doing every day.

Keeping a journal may help. It will take a while, but it's smart of you to think about these things.

Edited 2019-06-01 02:56 (UTC)

I'm not sure how that will help me make long term plans, unless the idea is to find out what I like doing and to maximise the mount of time spent pursuing those things, but I think that's a good idea in general. Keeping track of things like that, maybe using a number scale to rate the things, would possibly help me to notice any patterns in my interests.

My main concern with a journal is that it might be easy enough for someone I don't want to run across it and read it. Though I guess if I'm putting down things like the number of dogs I petted in a day it's not likely to be that big of a deal. I can also just write in Japanese since I don't think that many people here can read it. Maybe I can find a secure way to write it digitally, too, so it would be hard for someone to just search my room and take off with it.

[oh no, ruby, what are those instincts that tell you to encode and encrypt your everyday teenage musings--well, being raised in a cult, she's said so. but. geez.

that said: she likes your meticulousness.]

That is the idea, yes. Our everyday lives are so full of incident that things can pass in a blur. A journal is a solid record, and you can go over it to see patterns you didn't realize--so if you find that dogs are what you enjoy most, maybe you could start researching what it takes to become a dog breeder, or to train service dogs, or become a veterinarian.

I hope you don't have to worry about people using a daily journal for nefarious purposes, but anything is possible here. You're probably right about putting it in Japanese--I think the only people around here who can read it are Japanese imPorts like us.

[ A cult, and being the daughter of a crime lord before that! Not that that part comes up all that often. ]

This is going to sound stupid, but it never really occurred to me that I could get a job with animals. I never get bored of animals, especially not training them. So that's probably the place to start looking first. I mean, I think animals are the only thing I've never gotten bored of for even a moment. There have been a couple times where I got bored of even researching new things, which is saying something, because I'll research just about anything at least once.

I'm not all that worried about other imPorts, but it's possible something private will come up and I'll write it down, or I'll write something that could be seen as a sign of violent intent, and if a non-imPort gets a hold of that, well. People love to sensationalise things when they don't see the targets as real people. You know?
Obi-Wan is learning Japanese. But he's the only non-Japanese imPort I've seen with any signs of interest in the language.

There you go. And if you can convince Canada geese to cooperate with you, I can't imagine other animals would be outside your capabilities either.

I do know... it's one of my least favorite things about this version of Earth, being turned into public figures without warning. Still, I hope they would stop short of breaking into your private belongings.

I think Jaime-san knows a little Japanese too, but it's been a while. I'm told it's difficult for a lot of people if they didn't grow up with it.

Oh yeah. Canadian geese were actually one of the harder species to get to agree to things. They're just so full of malice. It's pretty cool, actually. A lot of creatures are capable of malice, usually when threatened, but these guys just seem to be on a constant caffeine withdrawal kick.

That is a down side. So far I've been lucky because I don't think a lot of Americans are very good at telling Asian faces apart, and since I dyed my hair brown there aren't really any distinguishing features about me beyond 'Japanese' and 'grey eyes'. [ Sure, she was technically mixed - there was no other reasonable explanation for her natural hair colour being red - but as far as she could tell even the most well-meaning American couldn't tell someone of Japanese heritage apart from someone of Korean heritage most of the time, let alone someone who had a couple of westerners in the bloodline a couple generations ago ] Most people don't get to see my eye colour from a distance. And honestly there are plenty of people with messy brown hair. I blend in fairly well even after forgetting that the whole moon sports thing was being broadcast back to earth. I don't know how long that's going to last though. I'm just living it up while I can before I have to deal with people being weird all the time.

I always find that a little weird. As someone who was raised with both Japanese and English for the first eight years of my life, Japanese is so much easier than English on so many fronts. It probably helps that Japanese is phonetic, while English is just this mishmash of sounds that commonly don't sound how they're spelled.

my life expectancy was abt 10 minutes yet here i stand 3.5 mil years later insufferable and alive i never had no plans

Weren't you at war at the time? It's the after the war that probably needs some sort of planning. At least when you're flesh and blood. I don't know how your people's biology works, or how your society views people, so I have no idea if planning for things long term is even a common thing there.

That said, congrats on vastly outliving your intended shelf-life.

same 2 u and i was but i was made w a purpose and had to follow other ppls orders i get what u mean tho after the war just about no1 knew what to do with themselves i think it depends bc this world isnt even stable or guaranteed

You guys spent millions of years fighting. Even if most of you guys had things you did before war, it would probably feel weird to go back to it... I think? Sorry. My assumptions there are based on human reference points.

Yeah. That's one thing that's frustrating. There are options closed off to me completely because if I were to take them and then suddenly disappear it could mess a lot of things up. Like maybe it would be fun to be a rock climbing guide some day, but if I ported out on the job someone could die, so no one in their right mind would hire me for it.

i wouldn't know. i wasn't alive before the war. then dont do rock climbing?

Yeah, that makes sense. And a war that big probably killed the majority of people who were born before it.

Oh I'm still going to rock climb, just not as a guide. The issue is more that options I think would be fun have been closed off to me due to the lack of stability. I mean, I'll get over it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

uhhh yeah dont want to talk abt that anymore thats life sucks

No problem.

Yeah. That's how life is sometimes.

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