Why be stressed?

Events like those in the last post tend to get me feeling stressed, and I always feel dumb when I realize this. Why should a mere game stress me? Doubly so, why should I let myself get stressed just because someone else is acting inappropriately? And finally, even if these things should cause stress, shouldn't this conclusion and closure resolve it?

Indeed, it does, just not immediately. For a while after, the "it's done" has to slowly soak in, and during this time, other matters are more likely to crank up my stress than they would be at other times.

Fortunately, I have some good destressors coming up. First, our roleplaying group is roleplaying again, and that's always a good step. Plus, and I wasn't expecting this when we started up again, it's good to be GMing after a while away from it. I usually do a tiny bit more of the group's GMing than I would in an ideal world, and after a while of GMing the ache to play is palpable. But the reverse, when I've been away from GMing a while, sneaks up on me unnoticed. It wasn't until a few hours into the game that I found myself thinking, "ah, I missed this".

Weekend after next is Lorecon, which should be an exhausting rush of games, including one I'm GMing which (to my surprise) a few people have actually signed up for. (Unfortunately, Columbia Games, which is supposed to support me with handouts and coupons and stuff since I'm pushing their product line, let me slip through the cracks and is now ignoring me.) Cons are always a good destressor; it doesn't just take you out of life for a weekend, it takes you out of your life about eight different ways in a single weekend. Half of them will probably be duds, but that's still four more escapes than you usually get in a weekend.

To round things out, next month we're planning a little seaside getaway in Salisbury, Massachusetts. The smell and sound of the sea have a literally legendary power to destress. We're still figuring out what we're going to be doing there, and it might be not much more than lying around doing nothing -- some vacations are busy ones where we bustle from museum to activity, and some much slower-paced, and both are good.

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea." - Isak Dinesen