Barbarian Camps in Life

It would be fantastic if someone could tell me why life must be so very, very complicated.  What is it about life that must - absolutely MUST - sneak up behind you, just when you're walking blithely down the street, whistling Adele, and shank you?  Why, why, why, why, why?

No, I'm not frustrated.  I'm confused, irritated, nervous, and at this particular moment, full-on scared.  I wish I could understand why things can never follow a straight line, even when it seems like they are.  And yes, I know, I know, any line that you follow for any significant distance actually curves, because of the curvature of the earth, yes, yes, yes.  I know that.  But stay with me.  We're on a metaphorical plane right now.  If you create a path that should follow a straight line, why is that, all of a freakin' sudden, there pops up a curve you didn't know existed?

Okay, time to reveal some serious geekishness.  You know how in some games, like, for example, Sid Meier's Civ 5, you're happily modding a new world, and then you set out to play it, and all of a sudden, something appears in that world that you absolutely DO NOT remember putting in?  Like a barbarian camp that appears in the several-square-space that you explicitly reserved for your starting city that should not have ANY barbarian camps in it, because barbarian camps + starting cities = very slow advancement. This happens to me quite frequently, is terribly obnoxious, and is an outstanding example of what I'm talking about with regard to life.  A stupid freakin' barbarian camp has appeared near my starting city, and I was not prepared for it, and I just lost my worker.

Now, I'm not going to lie.  When this happens to me when I'm gaming, I will straight out quit the game and start a new one.  Yes, I know, I'm a lamer, but whatever.  I don't care.  I didn't spend all that freakin' time modding the perfect world to get taken out in the first 20 turns by a god-damned barbarian horde.  The crappy thing, though, is that in life, you don't get to start over.  You have to deal with the barbarian horde, and . . . and . . . and I don't know how.

Okay, yes, I've now written four paragraphs without explicitly discussing what the spine-shanking I've recently experienced actually IS.  But unfortunately, this time, I won't/can't do it.  I mean, I'll talk a bit in vagaries about what has sort of happened.  The details, though, are reserved for those few demented souls who have season passes to the full-time crazy that is me.  Count your blessings.  Those season tickets reserve for you a place in Hell, somewhere in the River Styx Condominiums, probably next door to Chris and Satan. You don't actually want them.

So, in vaguest terms, the curve-ball I've encountered is this: I recently discovered (like, yesterday morning), that I am apparently the same person that I was 13 years ago, before I ever got married, divorced, moved across the country twice, no, wait, three times, found myself, lost myself, got accepted to grad school, found myself again, lost myself again. . . .  It appears, to all intents and purposes, that I haven't actually GROWN in all that time, just submitted to the same Katie Paradigm over and over, like a tetherball.  Why the tetherball goes back to its abuser continually baffles and frustrates me, but it seems that I'm no smarter than the tetherball, only in this case, I'm both the abuser AND the tetherball.  I guess that's a metaphor that fell down, but I'm sticking with it.

What do you do when you think you've grown, but discover that, to all intents and purposes, you're still the same person you were when you were 18?  Isn't part of the joy of growing up knowing that you will NEVER have to be 18 again?  So why don't I get that joy?  I don't want to be 18 - 18 was awful - and while I'm not keen on 31, it's certainly better than 18.  I think people who rhapsodize about their teenage years are full of shit.  It's a terrible part of your existence, and the best thing that life can do is rapidly move you away from those years.  So you can see why discovering that I'm still the same feckless, reckless, selfish, unutterable bastard that I was when I was 18 is disconcerting, to say the least.

So what's the deal, life?  I thought you were supposed to cure people of their very worst traits and characteristics, and instill in them worthwhile and useful ones ("This'll give you character!").  I know that life doesn't necessarily change people's core personalities, but it's definitely frustrating to think that all those things that I'd thought I'd left behind aren't, in fact, traits and characteristics that I can snake-skin shed, but are rather permanently welded to my core self.

I don't know what to do with this knowledge.  I could ignore it, but that would be very Katie Paradigmatic indeed, yet if I can't change it (see core personality, above), then is there any point in fretting about how very worthless my core personality seems to be?

I'm giving myself a headache.  I've achieved nothing by setting this on digital paper, but I'm not going to delete it.  I'll break the paradigm.  Instead of ending the game, and starting a new one, I'll let this game sit for awhile, and see if I can't find a way to make it out of the mess o' shit this barbarian horde has created for me.