Point of View

When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true... from a certain point of view.

--Obi-Wan

The Scene:

Sunday.  I was alone, by myself, all day.  I was ass-deep in the fetid jungles of Kurast, fighting the ancient...whatever and searching for yet another ancient relic with a backstory I don't care about with my level 19 barbarian, Jim.  Jim is a cool guy, but he did not exist before Sunday.  I basically played a ten year old game all day because I had nothing better to do.  I tried to be productive, but going for so many hours without talking to a human being makes me so strangely lonely that I can only do things that completely distract and numb me, like watch movies and play videogames.  Doing something useful, like one of the million projects I have on my personal "backlog," like creating a Lego replica of the companion cube, was out of the question.  I was absolutely miserable, cramped from slouching in my computer chair for so many hours and lamenting the fact that I had just wasted another perfectly good day because I'm not allowed to do anything strenuous until they debug my heart and because I didn't have anyone I could hang out with on short notice.
 
The Turn:

I went for a walk, and thought about stuff like how did my life end up this way, etc.  Then I came back home and remembered that The Girl Who Played With Fire is available via netflix.  There are some girls I know that I could hang out with but didn't want to if it was just me and them, either because we don't know each other well and it would be awkward, or because she had rejected me and it would be awkward and what I will start refering to as "party rules" ('dragon rules' seemed too corny) dictate that I can never let her be close to me again.  However, I can hang out with all of them at the same time.  I decided to invite them over to watch this movie.  I'm going to skip the next line of reasoning, because it is even weirder and more difficult to explain, but suffice to say there was a total ordering on which girls I invited, where, in order to avoid awkwardness, I could not proceed to the next girl until the previous one was going to show up.  Yeah...it really only sounds strange when you put it in writing.  I'm sure all of you do the same thing in some way.  Anyway, so that failed, but I did get counter-invited out to this club Solo by 'bb9 (my first invite, and a girl I have no intentions of hooking up with).  The last time I was at Solo with 'bb9, I met her friend, a cute asian that lives in my apartment: Apartment Girl (Evan cracked my girl-hashing with a 20 line perl script).  I suck at reading signals, but it seemed that Apartment Girl didn't hate me.  Me and Apartment Girl walked back to our apartment complex together in the pouring rain which soaked our shoes, and then parted ways because I was too cold to think of a casual way to ask for her number, and telling her how convenient it would be to be hooking up with someone in the same building probably would have been a bad choice.  So, again, I'm bad with signals but I think she might have been interested.  Idk.  Therefore, Party Rules dictate that I go to this club Solo in the hopes of seeing Apartment Girl again and hopefully walking home with her again, this time getting her number under the pretense of some random activity like salsa dancing.  I left Jim in the Spider Jungle of Kurast, after having just raided the wrong dungeon for something, and walked like four blocks in the freezing cold that I wasn't layered for because I didn't want to be the weird guy that takes off 20 layers when I got there, and finally arrived at Solo.  I didn't see the group at first, so I just went straight for the bar and stood awkwardly for ten minutes to get a captain and coke.  Then I took a sip in order to not spill it, and some douche bag decided to almost walk into my elbow and then give me a weird look, cause, you know, no one ever takes a drink when they get one, and he only had a measly 70 square foot area in which to maneuver around me.  Then I look over to my friend.

The Other Scene:

My friend was there, yes.  Her group of friends was not.  Most importantly: Apartment Girl was not there.  However, there was one other...person.  I have held off writing about this subject because its not something I want to think about and I didn't really want written proof that I dislike one of the protected social classes, but, I mean, damn.  Her friend was a guy who was pretending to be a girl.  Physically, I didn't know or want to know the details but he did such a poor job with the appearance that at first I wasn't sure he was actually trying to pretend to be a girl, and just talked funny, but a lot of his fat was in the chest area--too much for man boobs--and he was doing both the voice and the weird mannerisms.  By "the voice" I mean the breathy falsetto voice that guys use when they can't sing and can't maintain a real falsetto for long periods of time.  And the arm movements.  I realized then, that I cannot hide my hate.  I'm fine with guys doing that in the abstract.  I mean, I feel insulted that another guy would basically give our entire gender the finger and go cut off his balls and become a parody of the other one, but that's fine--it doesn't really affect me, and to be perfectly honest, I normally don't really care what other men do, or are, at all, as long as they are not running my car over with an amphibious tank.  This time, though, it affected me.  I spent...I don't now how long, but a really long time in a three way conversation dealing with this guys falsetto voice and fake mannerisms.  I hated talking because talking meant I had to look at him and that was painful.  I eventually started tuning out and staring around the bar.  I don't know what the party line is in this modern age of ultra ...t...something...temperate....tolerance.  I don't know what we're supposed to say in this modern age of ultratolerance, but here is my honest opinion:  cutting off your balls and wearing plus size girl clothing, or not actually cutting off your balls but still pretending to be a girl, is something you do to yourself: its like being an emo kid, or a goth kid (by the way: emo and goth girls: hot), so I'm not giving them any special...whatever, and I'm not playing along.  Telling people you are a vampire doesnt give you real fangs, and telling people you're a girl doesn't give you functioning ovaries.  Ugh--I can actually still hear his voice in my head.  But I digress.  I went out hoping to meet a girl, and met a guy instead, and we weren't even anywhere near Capitol Hill.  I finished my drink, let the ice melt, and then excused myself at 11:30pm saying I had to work tomorrow.  I don't know if the disruption of my chivalry went unnoticed, or if I alienated 'bb9, but I hope not, because I still need Apartment Girl's phone number.  I don't understand the girl fascination with gay or fake-girl men*.

The Prestige:

Suddenly, lounging around in my pj's, alone, by myself, in my warm, cozy apartment, playing an outdated--classic--videogame where the only male voice I hear is a sexy, deep baritone** while sipping a glass of milk didn't seem bad at all.  In fact, from my new point of view, it was quite nice.  In fact, me and Jim the Barbarian found the correct spider dungeon, and did loot whatever random ancient relic I was supposed to get.  Jim and I slept comfortably that night, I in my bed, and Jim--now a level 21 barbarian--in the hard drive of my linux desktop.

...what?

Yeah, you can play Diablo2 on linux.  Wine supports it.  Just, don't cd into the file path of the cd drive when you run it, and have a separate terminal open for using the eject (not unmount!) command to switch the cds.  If your monitor flips out and incorrectly thinks a ten year old game is requesting 1600x1200, tell wine to run in in a fake desktop, and then use "xrandr -s 1024x768" to change your resolution right before you play (xrandr effects nonpermanent changes and leaves xorg.conf unmarred).  Be advised: everything I just wrote is applicable for my specific version of Ubuntu, and probably wont work with anything else.  You know...easy.

If all that doesn't work, turn off your computer and go outside.




*When I hang out with girls, they're like always pointing out hits on their "gaydar," like "oh, look, that scarf?  I bet he's gay!!! ::squeal of happiness::" or "you know the author of that book, who inscribed names from the greatest love story he ever wrote on his and his wife's grave, was actually gay, right?  I read it on the internets." or "that singer songwriter is gay, he just doesn't know it yet, its SOOO SADDD."  They say it like they are revealing a treasured secret, like the fact that some celebrity doesn't like boobs is as momentous a secret as discovering p=np, and not something I couldn't care less about.  Why can't girls instead theorize about other girls?  I would like that better.  "Hey.  See her?  Yeah, I bet she likes girls too."  I wouln't necessarily care about this information either, but it would be soooo much more pleasant to hear.

**I have no idea what kind of voice the voice actor for the barbarian character in Diablo2 has; I just really wanted to write 'baritone.'  You're welcome to investigate if you actually care.