Having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.” —Spock, Amok Time

Knitting is not so pleasing a thing as planning. In the planning stage, all the possibilities are wide open. The vision of the project-to-be shifts like a kaleidoscope in your mind, with each new version somehow more beautiful and intriguing. You hold in your imagination an ideal garment in the perfect colors, the perfect fiber. Technical hurdles, dropped stitches, bungled calculations, dwindling dye lots, and worries about gauge are nothing but hazy spectres on a distant horizon.

Having is not so pleasing a thing as knitting. It’s weird how, while you’re knitting, you’re comepletely focused on this thing and how great it’s going to be, and the marvelous process of watching it take form. But, then, in the end, once you’ve finally cast off and seamed up and worked in all the ends and blocked, you feel this pang that it’s all over and now all you have is this . . . thing. Not always, I guess, just sometimes.

Role-playing is not so pleasing a thing as character creation. GMs say that no game survives contact with the players; I think it’s also true that no character concept survives contact with the game. Before the game, you have authorship of your character. You have as long as you like to decide what happened to your character in the past, how they responded, and how this shaped their personality and the course of their life. Once the game begins, you have to actually roleplay. In the heat of the moment, you do things that are not perfectly in-character, and, like it or not, these become part of the character. As the world and the story evolve, the pre-game-past is ret-conned and compromises are made to fit the system, the group and the plot. And then there’s the stupid stuff, like the sudden realization that everyone at the table is convinced that your character is blonde, when you’ve described the character as red-headed since day one.

2

I have an entire bin full of completed needlepoint projects upstairs, waiting to be turned into … something.

3

I agree. Drawing is not as pleasing as sketching. When I have a rough sketch in front of me the loost lines contain so much potential. And then I spend hours outlining and inking and colouring and I almost always prefer the sketch. I dunno why I bother, really.

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“Programming is not so pleasing a thing as Software Engineering”. – UncleRojelio, 2005

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Possibly this is why I have a garage full of more hardwoods and turning blanks than I’ll ever get to use, and will still buy more if I happen to see a good deal. But my actual * woodworking * activities are embarassingly few.

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Man, you nailed me right on the head.

I’m all about the planning and even executing the plan, but the finished product is rarely satisfying.

Can we get a psychologist to opine?

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I think I might be the opposite. I like finishing stuff and I can’t sleep until it’s done. Knowing this, I often fail to start projects unless I am reasonably sure I can finish them, all the way to the end. I wouldn’t be able to handle a bunch of half-way-done projects lying around. It’s feels so incomplete or half-assed.

There’s a question on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test that asks whether you enjoy starting things more than finishing things. I don’t remember the point of that question though.

8

Posting is not so pleasing a thing as planning.

Especially the first post of a new thread. I think about it for days, imagine responses and my next post. And then I type it and it reads clunky, or people misunderstand (or fail to respond at all) and I wish I’d stuck to reading other peoples posts.

This is not * always* true-- but sometimes I’m better off posting without thinking about it too much in advance.

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I’m not that way.

When I’m writing software, as an example that comes up frequently in my life, the planning is a pain in the ass.

Actually writing the software is a lot of fun. I take it in small steps, and get a little thrill of completion every time a piece works. But it still bothers me that I’m not done, possibly because the dreaded insurmountable hurdle might be in the next code block.

Getting done and seeing it work is the real kick. It doesn’t last (because I’m no longer doing much with it), but it’s very satisfying.

I’m pretty much that way with everything I do.

10

This is true now for me, but once upon a time we had epic adventures and role-playing supported by active imaginations and youthful exuberance and too much time on our hands. I had at least 4 campaigns that I should have taken better notes on and novelized. Now I am older and have far less time. We play but occasionally and it is more like the “guys” getting together for a poker game than the old campaigns.
I still have friends that talk about the attention to detail I used to put into the game, of course this is usually, pointedly in contrast to the current campaign. It started well but withered. I once had a player playing a Bard who wrote songs to perform his game spells as I rewarded these efforts with extraordinary effects.
I had several comic nuts that drew up detailed pictures of the entire party and many of my NPC’s.
I have always been into drawing up detailed maps and runes and languages. My best campaigns were run in Middle Earth where the background story was in place and there was a rich world in need of deep exploration. In this way over a 15 year period the campaigns actually grew on each other with ever more details available.

Jim

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Quite honestly, this is what scared me most about marriage. I didn’t know how I could be sure that, once “the thrill of the chase” was gone, how much interest would remain. It’s been almost 18 years, so I guess I got my answer, but it did worry me at the time.

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I agree with the thread title but I’m ready to try the having bit now. I’m a little tired of the wanting.