We’re headed into the third month now. I’d kind of been hoping that, much like Jesus
on toast or Mother Teresa on a baby’s diaper or some old guy with huge, stone
billboards that, let’s face it, he just never could have actually carried down
that mountain but that’s a rant for another time, I’d get some kind of sign for
how this month would go. (to recap for
anybody who has just started reading this blog and, for some inconceivable
reason, is reading it from the top down, month one was pretty much spent
crying, sleeping during the day and wandering the streets naked and alone with
a bottle of vodka and a My Little Pony during the night, where as month two has
featured me mostly pretending I never had a relationship, never got left (let alone
repeatedly!) or heartbroken and lunging at the “off” button on the radio
whenever any of the many completely off-limits songs came on. Super-healthy stuff, yeah?) Anyway, month three.
I’ve checked online and there’s no answers there. Which is surprising! There are always, ALWAYS answers to every
single question online! Even questions
that you had no idea anybody was asking, like “average penis size for Asians?”
or “how to tell if an orange has gone bad?”
And yet this question I’m not getting any help on.
So I started thinking about where it is that I want to be
when my proposed “getting over things” period is done. One of my big frustrations is now that I’m
not spending hours and hours on Skype with someone every day I’ve got time on
my hands. Also I’m no longer saving
every single spare penny to pay for thousands of dollars of international plane
tickets for other people, so I’ve got a little extra scratch. So I’ve got some $$$, and I’ve got some time
– you’d think this would be good! Give
me the chance to go out and have some fun, do some things, build a real
life. Right? Wouldn’t you think that? I was totally thinking that.
Except what I don’t have more of than before is people with
which to do stuff.
Don’t get me wrong: I
have some wonderful friends and my most excellent family, all of whom I cherish
and am so lucky to have. But my friends
are either married with kids and bed times and the requirement to find someone
else to take care of things like kids and bed times for them to be able to go
do stuff or that awkward “rock/scissors/paper” decision for which of my two
best friends (who happen to be married to each other) gets to go and do the
stuff and have the fun OR they’re super-busy with school and work and the
social life that they were building when I wasn’t available most of the time
because I was spending time on skype. Oh
irony, I hope you’re a dude because someday I so want to kick you straight in
the nuts.
My family is mostly made up of the older generation, and I
love them. But they’d be the first to
tell you that they’re not up for rock climbing or going dancing or seeing the
latest rock’em-sock’em-all ‘splosions, all the time summer blockbuster movie. And also, and I hope I don’t come off as a
douche by saying this ‘out loud,’ but though I love my family and know how
amazing lucky it is to be part of a group of people who actually, genuinely enjoy spending time together, I don’t
want my entire social life to be my family.
I want friends. I’m a friendly
person. I think I can be
entertaining. I can quote the entire
script for Ghostbusters, Caddyshack and Star Wars. I make balloon animals, for the love of god! I should be able to make friends.
Except that making friends is just hard.
First you need to
meet people with whom you’d like to be friends, and who want to be friends with
you. You already know how very
successful my online attempts have been, in that they have not. I’ve also been checking out groups of people
who get together regularly and do things that I might like to do.
A few months ago, while I was still hoping that T.E and I
might have one more summer together, I found a local LARP group. (tangent:
for those normal people who have lives and understand that a LARP is the
social pariah equivalent of dropping your pants and shitting in the kiddie pool
I won’t bother to explain. For those who
are blissfully unaware here’s the $.05 explanation: it’s like playing Dungeons and Dragons, but
you dress up as your character, go to a place with other people dressed up like
their characters and you act out the
game. If it’s a medieval one then you
say “forsooth” and “what ho” in the English accent and you woogy-woogy your
fingers at people to show you’re working your magic on them or you have a (I
kid you not) big, soft sword that you use to act out your fighting.
The LARP I checked out was a local version of one that T.E.
had been playing in the UK. I admit it
sounded like it could be cool – in this LARP everybody is pretending to be a
kind of vampire. You have personalities
and attitudes and powers and other things, and the acting out appealed to me
because I my favorite game forever and ever when I was a kid was Make Believe,
and that’s just what this is. It’s Make
Believe for kids. At first I liked it
well enough, but I found the ENTIRE BOOK of rules to be overwhelming. Then again I had that reaction with D&D
too, so I figured I’d get there eventually.
The pretending was fun, and I thought things would get interesting as I
understood the players and the dynamics better.
I just recently decided to stop going, and the reasons were
two: First, the rules never got easier
to grok. So many rules! Just the rules for combat where ridiculously
dense: First you check your multi-page
character-sheet-thingie to see how many of this and that you have. Then you check three other levels of
things. Then there’s abilities of
others, and there’s the order in which you go, and on and on and on. I could never make it all work, so any combat
I was in I was just along for the ride.
And how is that Make
Believe? In Make Believe all you need to
know is who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy, and the bad guy always loses
in the end. Thus endeth all Make Believe
rules.
The other reason was I was hoping to make friends with these
folks, and it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. This group seemed to be made up of two types
of people: those so completely geeky
that even I was embarrassed to talk to them (the guy with a beard finely
sculpted into a long point, the girl who has no idea how far her voice carries
in a fairly busy all-night diner as she’s screaming about her next character
who will be a whore, whore, W-H-O-R-E… I
knew that these might be the folks I met.
But I wasn’t expecting the other group:
the ones who were completely disconcerting because they play the game
for the love of screwing people over, and when the game is done they bemoan how
they can’t do more of that in real life.
I’m sorry, what? You’re bummed
because real life requires that you don’t shiv somebody at the buffet? Yeah, you I don’t need to make any friends
with…
Tonight I checked out a local Comedy Improv group that
started meeting about a month ago. I was
hoping to meet likeminded individuals who were funny and liked other funny
people. Instead I found ChicagoDan – a guy
who has never performed Improv in front of other people, but figures he’s the
guy to start the coolest Improv group this town has ever seen. Now he’s setting the bar low to be sure, but
his hubris has to be balanced against the fact that I’m the only person who
showed up for the group tonight. Me and
ChicagoDan, comparing the lengths of our Improv dicks to see who’s the
improviest of them all.
(It was me)
I’ll check out the Improv group one more time just in case
tonight, and ChicagoDan, were flukes.
But so far my goal for Month three of building the life I’d like to have
is… well… it’s a turd floating in the kiddie pool.
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