Doing what you love? OR Loving what you do?

I have only occasionally talked about it here, but I am the Guild Leader of The Pentaverate on Thunderhorn, a casual guild on the Alliance side. I didn't start out as the guild leader of this guild, but since I had begged my friend Jared to do the founding of the guild, when he was ready to step down after two years, I felt obliged to step up and take on the role. It's mostly been good. It's had its challenges, like any change, but I've been doing it for about a year now, and I think I have a good groove going most of the time.

At first, we were small, and there was no officer corps but the GM and his lovely wife. But around the time that the guild grew enough to need an officer or two, I was it. I liked the acknowledgement of the work I had done to help the guild, and at the time, a promotion seemed the only way to do it. I loved the process of growing, and we were tiny for a long time. We weren't selective enough at first, though some might say EVER, and we paid a price for that in occasional flurries of immaturity and drama. I learned to use my /gkick, and eventually, we instituted a process of recruiting and introductory ranks that sorted a lot of that out.

I was playing a hunter then. It was easy to solo, and I assure you I was very much every bit the Bad Hunter of WoW stereotypes. I never really instanced on my hunter until 70, and certainly I never learned to TRAP or anything else that made for good hunters in BC. I wasn't all that wedded to playing her, which was good, because I was about to do my first main-switch for guild benefit.

We were talking about moving into doing a little casual raiding, but our guild lacked a tank at level 70. I had a paladin who I had leveled as holy, for whatever that means for someone who never really understood that holy was for healing, not soloing quests. Masochism comes in many, many forms, I guess. So I changed her spec to Protection and started learning, with the help of patient guildies, how to be a good tank. I took pride in being a woman in a role that many raiders thought were for guys only, and whenever someone assumed I was a man, I happily corrected them. I was a tank, damn it.

But come Wrath, many of our healers had decided to move to other servers, re-roll as DPS, or were taking the slow leveling route to 80. I had a healer-alt sitting at 70, and my guild needed me to heal more than they needed me to tank. So I main-swtiched again, first to a Holy Priest and then to Discipline. (I will NEVER go back to Holy having healed Ulduar on as Discipline. Bubbles! OMG, BUBBLES!) I have theory-crafted and "dug deep" with healing more than I ever did as a tank, and I think it's paid off. I am confident of my ability to heal anything in the game. Being good at healing has been a source of pride for me, but it's also kept me locked into doing that for my guild, sometimes when I couldn't get any benefit from the content we were running other than to help other people to gear up. I felt burn-out rearing its ugly head. I wasn't sure how to proceed. Insist that I get to tank the alts run? We had abundant tanks, even for the alts run. If I insisted, someone would be out a tanking slot on an alt, or the second run might not happen at all. That wasn't really any choice at all.

So I made a decision to more or less shelve my tank except for heroics. My current project is my Boomkin, who is needed to help make our second raiding team go. (Comprised both of alts like mine and the people who don't have a slot in the Tuesday/Thursday raiding from week to week. The perils of having about 15 people in the guild who want to raid regularly.) I've been learning what it takes to be good ranged DPS, and it's been really educational. I am loving Boomkin quite a bit, but I find that I am having a small identity crisis after all this divided focus.

Am I still a tank? A healer? Am I now a DPSer, obsessed with meters and crits? Is this masochism? Self-sacrifice? Am I happy even though I don't get to tank anymore? Do I do what I love? Or is my WoW experience entirely learning to love what I am doing?

None of my main-switches or leveling decisions were made out of a personal impetus beyond what the guild needed. I would NEVER have thought to try tanking without that need, but I loved doing it. I wouldn't have given up tanking but that we wouldn't have raided at all without more healers, and I really think now I identify as a healer about all else. The newest wrinkle is that I'm actually enjoying the Boomkin thing, and watching the big numbers roll in over my target.

So I am loving what I am doing, even if they weren't the choices I would have made for myself, absent the need of the people I play with, and finding satisfaction in that. But it's not the satisfaction that comes from a martyr's sacrifice, but genuinely loving roles I wouldn't have chosen for myself.

Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I borrowed this from Jenn to read over break, and while I didn't quite finish it during Winter Break, I managed to polish it off this morning. I had liked The Time Traveler's Wife reasonably well, but the back blurb for this one had generally excited me. Ghosts! Twins! London! Highgate Cemetary!

While some of that remained exciting (Niffenegger's fist chapter about Elspeth learning to be a ghost is particularly charming), I found I only empathized with a couple of the characters at all. Many of them I prayed would grow up or meet a bad end...and Niffenegger refused to deliver on that.

With the exception of Martin, I found that the likable characters in this book met the saddest ends, and the truly despicable characters, like Elspeth, got happier endings. In that sense, I found it ultimately unsatisfying, but there were many aspects of the book I found really enjoyable, and so I can still comfortably give it 3 stars.

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Re-greets

Well, I never intended this blog to become books only, but we've certainly made a slide that direction. Let's see what we can't do to rectify that, before law school erases good habits and good intentions!