Thursday, May 22, 2003
di·chot·o·my n
1. a separation into two divisions that differ widely from, or contradict each other
To describe the last two days as a dichotomy would probably be accurate. In doing so, I can also reveal one of the exciting projects I've been alluding to over the last week or so. I've been wanting to "spread my wings" so to speak with my writing career and try and get work with non-gaming magazines. Given my interest in technology in general, and gaming's growing prominence among the mainstream, I figured this would be a good time to make the jump by pitching a gaming piece to a magazine. With help and encouragement from Kristie, an old colleague from CNN in Hong Kong, I pitched it to TIME magazine. And they expressed an interest in it... except it clashed with another piece they already had ready to run, so couldn't take it up. And that, I thought, was the end of that.
Roll on Tuesday morning, when I see another email from TIME. They didn't want to revive my pitch, but instead had something else for me to work on... the caveat being that it had to be done within the next two weeks. Great news! I replied to say I was interested, and left feeling rather good about myself. A potentially great break here.
I was about to go down to hang out with my cousin at this bowling alley (I despise bowling itself, but they have the only decent arcade for miles and it's within walking distance) when I got a message on the computer. A fellow gaming journalist -- and fellow football nut -- from Finland, Thomas Puha, was urgently looking for me. Because Thomas had two tickets for next week's Champions League Final. And none of his fellow Finns could get a flight down here in time. Given that the venue is Manchester, a three hour train ride for me... he offered me the ticket. VIP ticket, courtesy of Sony, to the biggest football game of the season, starring one of my favourite teams, AC Milan. Too good to be true, right? So I braced myself for his price. He could have said £100 and it would honestly have been a reasonable price (though whether I could afford to pay that price is debatable). Instead he says he'll give it to me if I pay for half the cost of the hotel room. My jaw hit the floor. I agreed, and he said he'd confirm the details tomorrow.
Then... I went to McDonald's.
To finish it off, by the time I got home, the last episode of the brilliant second season of 24 was ready and waiting for me on my hard drive. I watched it and enjoyed it immensely. Tuesdays will always feel a little different now that I'm not scrambling to be the first to download the latest episode of that show (and the way it's structured, you WANT to see the next episode as-soon-as-possible), but that won't hit me for a while. Great episode and a fine end to the season.
Needless to say, that was a very good day. What was to come over the next 24 hours wasn't.
First up, email from TIME. Where they drop the bombshell -- "sorry, I misjudged my deadlines, this had to be finished YESTERDAY, not in two weeks." Whatever work they had planned was effectively snatched from me before I even knew what it was. Which, you know, sucks.
As it's getting later in the day, I notice that I haven't had a message from Thomas yet. I haven't booked my train tickets for Manchester because I said I'd wait for him to confirm the details first. Bit odd that he hadn't come in yet. I managed to get a message through to him to get online, and I probably should have realised that he had bad news. It seems Sony screwed up with their ticket allocation, and Thomas won't have two tickets -- only one. So he's going, and I'm not.
He said his apologies etc, but it didn't make too much of a difference. I don't especially blame him, it's just... well, I'm a football nut, and it's my team in the biggest club football final in the world, and it's one of the things I've always wanted to see while in Europe (in my first year, I tried to get tickets for the 2000 European Cup Final in Paris, but was rejected by UEFA's "random lottery"). So you know, I can't really help but be disappointed, particularly because it came up so suddenly. Just minding my own business and then... hey! You're going to the Champions League Final! And then... hey! You're not!
It's also disappointing when allied to the second TIME rejection. I did feel that it probably wouldn't happen, but it was worth a shot nonetheless. And though it ultimately came to that in the end, again you can't help but feel disappointed by the nature of it. I'm generally pessimistic, but when two great breaks come up at once (which they did)... even I figured that at least ONE would pull through in the end.
I'm probably whining too much. Ultimately, the sum of the last two days is that nothing happened. I wasn't going for the Final or getting any work from TIME before Tuesday, and hey, I'm not getting any now. I guess I can't shake the feeling of disappointment because it's really been quite quiet recently, and there's not much to get me up and excited anymore -- nothing to "drown my sorrows in", so to speak, and I guess that's also bothering me... possibly more than the dual disappointment.
Either way, here's to tomorrow being an uneventful day.
Posted at 2:20 PM
