In Which I Originally Forgot to Title this Post

Happy belated Labor Day! I kept wanting/ meaning to post over the weekend, but since both my sister and J-beau were visiting, I didn't have a whole lot of time to compose my days into pithy anecdotes.

Truthfully, the weekend wasn't particularly exciting anyway. My family went to the Amish market for fresh pretzels and delicious meats. J-beau and I went wine tasting (please take a moment to laugh at how ridiculous the idea of fine New Jersey wine sounds), and then on the way home stopped by a race track and took in some drag racing. Wine + race cars = classiest, most random date ever.

The fun stuff all happened today, and that was what I was saving up my blogging powers for. Today involved driving way into Pennsylvania to get some footage of an installation for my company, and then driving into another section of Pennsylvania for my first ever roller derby practice!

I haven't been on roller skates since I was 17 and it was a part of high school gym curriculum. Still, I do have vague memories of being the best at roller blading on my block, circa age 6. I also like ice skating. These were pretty much my qualifications going into practice. I was the least expereienced of the rookies, but I had a lot of fun learning to stop and fall and block. I think that the sport will be a good outlet for my aggression, plus I don't think that I've played a legitimate, organized team sport (non gym class related) since... the fifth grade during an ill-fated attempt at the basketball team? Before that it was soccer in grade 2... which is another childhood trauma for another blog post.

Plus, I'm answering Grant's challenge from his last post, however indirectly. I haven't been back to the gaming store yet (too busy to fight the last boss!), but I have joined a team sport, which has to count for something - especially when its as cool as derby.

Grant makes a saving throw to end "drudgery"

I'm still not sure what this wonderblog is about. There's no real theme, except for "items of interest".  I imagined I would play off Tara's entires more, and vice-versa, but so far our entries have not had any relation.  I've decided to just let "it" happen, whatever "it" is.

And as fortune would have it, I have a continuation on the theme of Tara's Why Can' t We Be Friends? post. I went to bed Monday night feeling irritable and bored. I tried eating, music, cartwheels, whooping, walking, singing, conversation and hugs, but nothing made me feel better. I'll skip the internal monologue (which, incidentally has a neat Wikipedia page) which led to my diagnosis: I had nothing to look forward to. Without something enjoyable and reliable to fill my calendar, my foreseeable future was a grey haze of daily drudgery.

So I left the house Tuesday morning intent on finding a RPG group to join, specifically Dungeons & Dragons (What's an RPG you ask? I found a great RPG podcast, Fear The Boot, which dedicated Episode 115 to explaining RPGs for the layman). I've been meaning to start playing for a year now.  It was surprisingly easy. By the time I got home Tuesday evening, I had managed to find not one, but two groups to join (one of them completely by accident). I'm considering joining both groups too. It's more than the game, it's being able to hang out with some like-minded people. It's nice to know that I still have the capacity to make friends. I hung out with the first group as they smote some undead, and within an hour I felt so welcomed and totally at ease. They even took some time out to help me create my very first character.  I bought some new multicoloured dice, and I can't wait to break them out.  I am seriously nerding out you guys.

I challenge you, Tara: have you asked those fine gentlemen to be your friends?

Why Can't We Be Friends?

I have an awkward conundrum.

So I'm currently living in a suburban area with zero friends nearby, and a job that doesn't force me to interact with people in my age group on a regular basis. Being young and friendly, I'm finding the adjustment from university town life where everyone was close in age, proximity, and willingess to par-tay to this strange social wasteland where my middle aged neighbors rarely leave their houses.

I've never been in the situation where I've had to try and make friends without the aid of a pre-existing institution, be it a school, a summer camp, or even the randomly chosen roommates from my exchange program, and I'm finding it surprisingly difficult. I can't decide if this difficulty is society's fault or mine. With so many news reports and accounts (fictional and non) of rapists and murderers and kidnappers and smugglers and pirates and evil overlords permeating the media pop culture, is it any wonder that something as simple as making eye contact in public can be considered creepy? Why did that guy just smile at me in the produce aisle? Is he making fun of me? Is he going to sue me? Is he going to kidnap me and sell me into some sort of sick underground drug/slavery/concubine ring? I should probably pretend I need something from the dairy counter and RUN NOW.

I find myself frequently caught between this kind of irrational paranoia and, on the flip side, trying to overcompensate by forcing myself to be overfriendly, which probably causes other people to think that I'm going to murder them and turn them into home furnishings. So far my twin approaches of total mistrust and giant friendly smiles have yet to win me the friendship of random strangers, and I'm trying to figure out a new approach.

One idea, which I'm gathering the courage to try, is to randomly give my phone number to the nerdy guys who work at the local video game store. The last time I was there picking up Super Paper Mario (because I am crap at video games that aren't Paper Mario related) I struck up some good banter with the guys behind the counter. Joking about speaking German and how impressive their disc de-scratch-ifying machine was (super impressive!), I was struck by the urge to give them my number and ask if they'd ever like to grab a beer or engage in some good old fashioned nerdiness (D&D? Seeing Scott Pilgrim? I'm not picky!) but chickened out when I figured that they would consider my forwardness creepy, or misconstrue it thinking I was trying to get into their khaki cargo pants.

It reminds me a little of romantic comedies; gestures that seem really cute and thoughtful on paper but that suddenly seem more like grounds for a restraining order in real life. Not that I'm planning on sitting out side of the gaming store with a boom box, John Cusack style, but it does seem like there's more room for error than I'm normally comfortable with in my social interactions. Still, nothing lost and nothing gained. So when I finish Super Paper Mario within the next few weeks and have an excuse to see if they sell the old-timey Game Cube controllers, I think I might just be giving out my digits and hoping for the best.

(Poor Peach clearly did not get away from the guy in the produce section quickly enough.)