So it's been an interesting three or four weeks. Before I elaborate, I would just like to comment on the massive motivational boost to one's planning that can be granted by spending an entire night (as I did last night, and as I will again tonight) immersed in the sticky, foul-smelling, black-mayonnaise-like goop of a restaurant grease trap. Plumbing has its ups and downs, like just about any trade or field. But no downs, in my estimation, could be any lower than plunging your arms elbow deep into the kind of horrifyingly rancid sludge that festers in those grease traps. The words simply do not exist to convey the depth of my utter revulsion. I honestly think that, for a brief time last night, I was actually and legitimately insane, my rational mind overcome with horror. You might think I'm exaggerating, or trying to be clever or funny. You would be wrong.

It's that sort of thing that has really gotten me thinking over the last couple weeks. Rotten grease aside, there is little about plumbing to recommend it as a career for any rational, semi-intelligent human being. Not only are the opportunities for utter revulsion rich and abundant in every poop and sludge filled day, but the technical challenges for anyone of a slightly technical bent are nonexistent. Once you know how to read a table of pipe sizes or calculate the fall of a waste line, you're good to go. And judging by the intellectual capacity of many members of this old and dignified profession, it could literally be accomplished by a troop of trained monkeys.

I gotta get out.

My umbrella of research in the last month has shadowed a pretty large chunk of territory, ranging from learning the first stages of game development using ActionScript, to the way transactions are handled via PayPal and other methods, to the foundations of creating applications for Facebook. I've delved into PHP and MySQL with a fervency well able to overcome my natural boredom with such things. I've written back-ends for handling a number of different types of Flash-based multiplayer games, and prototyped a number of different styles of gameplay. I have scratched any number of large, rambling, and goal-less projects I have been tinkering with, coldly excising as much waste and fat from my programming time as possible, in an effort to more efficiently direct my time and efforts toward something productive, something that can potentially free me from the morass of poop-filled pipes, grease traps, A/C condenser lines filled with nasty boogers, and days spent roasting in the hot Arizona summer sun with shovel in hand, digging yet another pit to expose yet another shitty, corroded, leaking pipe.

Also: Flash development is fun. The natural limitations of the platform literally force me to abandon all my grand schemes of feature-rich, horribly complex engines, and to trim my ideas down to basic gameplay essentials.