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Diction on the Path to Self-Knowledge

  • Posted on August 27, 2009 at 8:36 am

I was sitting at my computer, playing World of Warcraft and decided to join a PUG* for a dungeon because there weren’t even enough people online in my guild to run anything and I was bored. Pete walked in to see what I was doing.

“How do you find your PUGs?” he asked. I pondered this for a moment. Some are awful and some are great; they’re really a hit-or-miss situation. I’ve been in groups that got wiped out completely in five minutes and groups that took hours to finish one dungeon and groups that took ten minutes to do the same dungeon I just spent hours doing.

“Well,” I replied, “Sometimes  they go smoothly and sometimes they don’t. I guess it’s luck, really…”

Pete looked at me, the look on his face a mixture of incredulousness and confusion. Then the understanding clicked. “No, I mean how do you find them, now how you like them. If I wanted to know if you liked them, I would have asked you ‘How do you like them?’ not ‘How do you find them?’ I’m not British.”

I’m not British, either, so I”m not entirely sure what he was going for there, but…ah, journey to self discovery.

 

*PUG is an acronym for pick-up group. This means that you’re running with people you don’t know; you just fill out a spot for whatever’s needed.

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A Brief Musical Interlude

  • Posted on August 19, 2009 at 6:05 pm

Pete, singing: There she was, just a-walkin’ down the street…do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do!
Me: What’s the name of that song? “Pretty Woman?” No, wait that’s not right…
Pete: I don’t know, go Google “do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.” Somethin’ll come up!

I’ll be damned if “Do Wah Diddy” isn’t the name of the song.

Now he’s in the other room shouting “SCIENCE!” and raising his arm. Life is weird, sometimes.

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Generation Gap

  • Posted on August 18, 2009 at 12:47 pm

I was raised as an only child.

I say “raised as” because even though I’ve always known about my big brother, I didn’t get the chance to actually meet him until last year, a few months after my twenty-sixth birthday. He’s nineteen years older than I am, so I’m not sure my life would have been any different even if we had met sooner as he would have been somewhere in the middle of his Freshman year of college when I was born.

My place in the family has always been a little on the strange side. My father is the baby of his family, sixteen years younger than his oldest brother. Adding on the fact that my father was forty-three when I was born leaves me in a sort of gap-area as far as cousins go. I’m over ten years younger than the next youngest cousin in my generation, and five years older than the oldest of my cousin’s children.

What this meant to me when I was younger was two things:

  1. There was usually no one for me to play with at family gatherings.
  2. I was always relegated to the “kid table,” so I was forever trying to advance myself to sitting at the “grown up table” because five years means so much when you’re fifteen and you have to sit with a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old.

Last Saturday, I went to my aunt’s house to visit with the four cousins that came from my Uncle Augie, the proverbial black sheep of the family.

Don’t worry, I’m probably the black sheep of mine, so I say that with love and affection.

I haven’t seen these cousins (or their children, who were all there except one) in years–while my father’s sister’s children all mostly stayed in Vineland, NJ, my Uncle Augie’s children ended up scattered to the winds–central New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio. No one’s particularily close to one another except the youngest–she lives close to her mother (the aunt at whom’s house we gathered) in PA.

When I walked in the door, I was quickly reintroduced to everyone–somewhat redundant as I feel like my cousins haven’t changed at all (which they would probably be delighted to hear me say) and it was easy to figure out which of their children was which as my memory for names and approximate ages is unsurpassed (preen, preen).

My father showed up, late as usual, and the introductions began again as my step-mom isn’t as familiar with everyone. In my dad’s old age (ha ha), he’s become very interested in his family history, and in my cousins, he found a whole new audience for the stories I’ve heard a million times before.

But the stories get old, even to me, and I found myself at one point sitting in a chair in my aunt’s living room watching Jacob-the-six-year-old and Rowan-the-fourteen(?)-year-old playing with action figures on the coffee table while Ryan, the oldest of that generation at nineteen, lounged on the couch behind them trying to assemble some action figure whose appendages are held on with magnets. On the chair that matched mine, Madelynne (who’s sixteen) was drawing in her sketchbook; alternating between a green armchair and running around was her sister Alaeta who’s somewhere around ten years old. My dad, step-mom, my aunt, and my cousins were outside talking or puttering in the kitchen. It was at that moment I realized something.

I was sitting at the kids table.

And I liked it better than the grown up table.

I mentioned this to Ryan, and he laughed. Then he rolled his eyes and said, “Well, duh. The grown up table doesn’t have action figures.” Very true.

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A Difference of Opinion

  • Posted on August 10, 2009 at 9:13 am

The way people live their lives depends fully on their point of view of a situation. For example, there’s my point of view, and then there’s the point of view of the cat with whom I live, Pud. For example…

The Upstairs Hallway
My Point of View: a conveinent way to get from my bedroom/the stairs to the bathroom or my roommate’s bedroom
Pud’s Point of View: prime napping real estate, but only if laying in the exact middle of the carpet

The Windowsill in My Bedroom
My POV: a place to put the extraneous things I was working on
Pud’s POV: strategic planning perch for potential world domination

My Roommate’s Desk
My POV: the place where Pete keeps his monitor
Pud’s POV: the best place to be when Pete is sitting at his desk

The Red Chair in the Living Room
My POV: a cute red chair I bought at IKEA
Pud’s POV: the best scratching post EVAR

My Bed
My POV: where I sleep at night or nap during the day
Pud’s POV: moar prime napping real estate, but only when Ama wants to use it

The Bathroom Sink
My POV: a place where I can brush my teeth and wash my hands/face
Pud’s POV: meow-activated water dispensing unit

The Kitchen
My POV: where I cook dinner
Pud’s POV: leg rubbing-activated food room

Despite these differences, though, I do love her. She has the loudest purr of any cat I’ve ever met; in fact, that’s how my roommate picked her–she was the littlest kitten in the box, but had the biggest purr out of all of them.

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Simalicious

  • Posted on August 4, 2009 at 9:24 am

I know just by posting the following statement, I am going to lose any amount of geek-cred generated by my last post, but I’m going to come out and say it anyway:

I love The Sims.

I can’t help myself. I love creating a Sim-me and decorating my house. I can get a little job in the field I’d like to be in, or one I could never get in real life (read: surgeon/criminal) and live my little Sim-life.

The Sim-world has come a long way from just creating Sims that just look like people I know, then capturing them in doorless rooms to watch them starve–in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, I can actually give my Sims personalities to match their human counterparts, so I can watch someone who looks and acts like my ex-fiancé drown in a swimming pool with no ladder. 

Muah ha ha. Mine is an evil laugh.

Most of the time, I admit, I micro-manage my Sims and line up their actions into infinity, so this personality tweaking ends up being almost cosmetic because Sim-me is going to write that goddamn novel whether she wants to or not and then she’s going to take a goddamn shower and go to goddamn bed and THEN SHE’S GOING TO FALL IN LOVE WITH THIS SIM, DAMMIT AND…

Sorry. Got a little carried away again…

So, in the interest of a social experiment conducted with state-of-the-art personality technology, I decided to make a Sim-me and a Sim-John and mostly leave them to their own devices in their Sim-World. I say “mostly” because it is still a game for me to play and left to their own devices, the Sims have a tendancy to watch television all day.

In the interest of fairness, after I designed how our Sims looked (”And for you, red hair!” “Auburn. My hair is auburn.” “[monstrous sigh] Fine. Auburn. It just looks red.”), I let John pick my personality traits and life goal then I chose his. For me, he chose

  • Bookworm
  • Neurotic
  • Flirty
  • Couch Potato
  • Good Sense of Humour

“Neurotic?” I asked.

“Well, I wasn’t sure about that one, but ‘depressed’ wasn’t on the list.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is my best friend. So, we looked up the Sim-definition of neurotic:

Neurotic Sims will freak out at the most minor of provocations. They become stressed easly and can be difficult to mellow. Luckily, they take solace in sharing their worries with others.

“Ah, well, nevermind then. Carry on.” I hate it when I lose a battle. The life goal he chose for me is to be an Illustrious Authour, which means Sim-me has to get her writing skill and her painting skill maxed out.

For him, I chose

  • Bookworm (we are predictable folk)
  • Grumpy
  • Good Sense of Humour
  • Neat
  • Absent-minded

He proved the last one completely correct by getting up and wandering away from his computer at some point during the Sim-John creation process, so I sat there typing “Pay attention to meee!!” messages across the Internet to either an empty room or to a John-playing-XBox-and-not-paying-attention-to-the-damn-computer. But, I digress…

I made his life goal be to become a Professional Authour which entails making $4,000 in royalty checks per week. Er, well, I guess it’s not dollars, but unfortunately I’m not sure how to make the little Simolean symbol. I can, however, make the Dutch Florin symbol (ƒ) although I’m not sure what practical purpose that would serve in my life.

Sim-creation complete, I bought us a nice two-bedroom house (graciously giving myself the smaller bedroom because I’m such a good friend) in Riverview, one of the free towns you can download. Usually, upon entering a lot, the Sims spend some time talking to each other, then admiring all their new things before I swoop in and begin orchestrating their lives.

Not so for Sim-me and Sim-John. We talked for about five seconds, then he sat down at the computer desk and started reading a book. I sat down on the couch with the TV off and started reading a book. The doorbell rang and a little thought bubble about answering the door popped up over both of our heads, but neither of us made any move toward the door.

I had to cancel Sim-me’s book reading to get the door. Three new Sims came in, and Sim-John continued to sit at the computer reading his book.

The tragically funny part is that this is exactly what would happen in real life if John and I were given a fully furnished house in which to life. My personality has been boiled down to five components and one life goal.

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