The Epic Battle

The Video Games Vs. The Girl

(At least in my experience) 

This is a classic battleground that I have watched many times inside of the past, slaps, yelling, phones, and above all death. Ok maybe not, but this is still pretty hilarious to watch. Everywhere is a potential battleground, ever place a potential battle. In fact this very evening I sit, having watched a epic clash having gone down, thankfully everyone left of this battle happy. 

Tonight we had, Charlie-i-don't-know vs. Michael-game addict. Tonight Charlie comes in from, a good hour or so away.  Michael comes in from the band practice, and the fight is on.  The night starts easy enough, Michael and Charlie go out to get something to eat, and come back to myself playing Metal Gear Solid 4. The suggestion is made by him to play some brawl, Charlie does not wish to play herself. A good three matches in, which is roughly 10-minutes, Charlie simply is staring at Michael, and the gauntlet is thrown...

"What do you want me to pay attention to you know?"

"No"

A quick start off, Michael declares at the start of the next match it will be his last, promptly, finishes and asks Charlie what she wants to do. She doesn't know thought, so Michael throws the next strike.   

"Want to play?"

A trick ment to include but really is just another excuse to feed the habit.  She says no, so he says what do you want to do than, and again she has nothing.  Michael picks up the controller once more. About this time, half way through the match, Charlie leaves and goes into another room.

I feel obligated to cut in, I tell him straightly, he is inept. Also somewhat of a dipshit. After words, Michael leaves and meets the locked door, of anger.  He than wins the battle with one quick word toss " If you don't unlock it i'll just go back to playing video games". The door gets unlocked shortly after. 

Everyone appears to have one somewhat, (slash the loser seems to be somewhat alright)

This is not a uncommon event, I have witnessed it many times before.  In the Past a friend of mine, lets call him Oleg. Oleg is a damn good looking fellow, works out and plays hockey, a big pretty boy.  Naturally he hangs out with me, because thats my type of friend (HA).  One night, three weeks after Resident Evil 4 is released, a challenger approaches. This time its Oleg's girlfriend calling on a friday night, the cell phone rings and its a duel she doesn't even know about.

Oleg has lightning fast reflexes, opens the phone and gets right to work. Oleg quickly goes into the small talk before she suggests hanging out, instantly he has his response. "Uh, crap, sorry I can't I have hockey practice tonight".  Just like that he has won, she never had a chance.  She was good looking, a little short on brains but that was sorta Olegs type. The awesomeness is not known to most people, Oleg never even pressed pause or stopped playing.

I have never understood this part of the Gamer, the utter rejection and hiding inside of video games. People are replaced in order to play another hour or so, not to lie I've come into the Arena close before.  At one point in time, a particular girl showed up slightly earlier than I expected, I played the remaining three minutes, to the cringe of this particular female. To be fair, I was playing that game for over half an hour and just needed to end.  I've really never had this problem before, most girls I have been involved with would beat the shit out of me I think if I snubbed them for a video game. I'm glad about that.

Introvert and Social Interaction

Its weird as hell to try and interact with anyone you don't know really well.  I have the constant feeling with people I talk to that my presence is not wanted, and that I am a burden merely by being around them.  As a result I am never comfortable, I am always figidity, always jumpy concerned that I am unwelcome.  If someone were to hit me in the face for what appeared to be no reason, I would assume a rational explanation behind it.

More and more, I am looking at this in relation to my interaction with my dad. I wouldn't go so far to say that I was abused, but rest assured it fucked me up pretty good.  I feel odd, I have only ever described it inside of a neutral tone, I rush thought saying events that were negative and put a somewhat positive spin on it.  I say I lived with my family inside of a trailer in southern Illinois, before we moved to carbondale. 

I don't say, I lived in a trailer with my mother because she was petrified of where her life had taken her. Sitting on a divorce with a achoolic who she felt compelled to leave for us, because our life was fucked.  My dad was kicked out of his previous job, and had some sort of criminal conviction, that I still don't know the details on.  So we lived off my Grandmother's measily salary as a governmental employee where she helped the disabled grandfather.  It was a lovely situation.  I remember playing a lot of video games at this point in my life, I am pretty sure based off later conversation my mom spent this time petrified and crying. 

I don't know if that effects who I am, or how, but I am sure it does.  I didn't have a lot of social interaction with other kids at this time, so I think my skills were low before I moved into actual schools.

Teasing was a fun thing, LET ME TELL YOU. That sucked. My general problems now socially I think are as follows...

Thinking negative things are acctually nice to say

Unable to operate a phone to call someone to do something

Unable to communicate on the phone with a somewhat well adjusted individual

Forgetting to mention things that are key to what I am saying that others might not know

Unable to communicate in general with people in simple conversation

Unable to have small talk about normal issues

Unable to mediate between thoughts that are reasonable and those that are not

Having virtually no tact at all

Unable to see who is socially awkward (Pro tip:Anyone who can actually talk with me is socially awkward)

INSANELY Paranoid, like to a extreme degree

Thinking I am a burden upon everyone I interact with

These are things last year I wanted to fix, now I don't know if I do.  I'm ok and content with it, but maybe I'm not? Its like when I think about if I suffer from depression. What if I am depressed and just don't know it, and meds could make me all "better"? What if I'm actually happy and just don't know it and the meds would make me worse?

Normal scares me, but its about as scary as being weird and not knowing it. I wish people had thought bubbles and you could just see what others honestly thought of you. Would make my life easier.

Ideology Does Make Subjects of Us All

Hey Brother, I thought I recognized you!”

 A shiver ran up my spin when I heard this on campus today.  Its nothing about the statement itself that bothers me so much, it’s the speaker which is somewhat disturbing to me. It’s a fatter white man in the middle of the OU campus. The notion of community among whites has always been a odd thing to me.  I am of the firm belief that community is not offended on whiteness, and whiteness does not bring people closer together inside of America, rather that because it is the dominant description inside of society that it precludes this. That small Russian communities are more of a community than the suburbs will ever be, that the interaction of middle eastern groups is infinity more productive than going to the Y. That you are more likely to form groups solely based off whiteness is ridiculous to me. 

 

This hailing thought, makes me question it.  When I hear a black male say to another , in reference in place of name of the label of brother it doesn’t bother me in the least. To me it seems to represent a essentialist ploy towards a transcendental experience, a common linking of hey not white either, even thought this isn’t as common place among people that you don’t know. But to refer to someone as a brother, is a odd way to both depersonalize a interaction with someone and to increase it at the same time. The brother is the nameless, the removed individual pulled away. The brother is the closest because they share the most tight knit of bonds, when they are in fact not your biological brother, I think the assessment is of race instead. 

 

The White hailing of the brother scares me terribly because to me it paints the image of someone who thinks whiteness is under attack. The notion that somehow there is a power struggle between whites and non-whites, and that we need a system of solidarity to keep ourselves protected from the dangerous “colored’ other. It screams klan meeting, religious fanaticism and exclusion while a majority.  Its because this group is in the dominate that side pockets of culture make sense, why on earth would anyone want to integrate into that? It strikes me as a odd question now, is that how all of white interaction is? Is the Klan the exception or the rule and its just more unspoken and hidden?  I question my role in this system.

 

I feel like a drifter, I am a white atheist, without a home or a community of my own. My behavior is erratic and unpredictable, very much on the extreme of everything, am I part of this problem?

Awkward

I talked with Jen for the first time since I got to OU today. A weird little moment, someone I was so close with now distinctly at arms length away, unknown and foreign to me.  It was a pretty shitty feeling considering shes the only person I opened up to really at OU, and that avenue doesn't seem to be open anymore.  I'm split between a desire to express my own anxiety because it seems healthy, but having trouble separating out a pervious interaction with what is now mandated.  

It is a pretty shitty feeling.  Her view of me has shifted radically I think too. Now everything I say comes off with spite and venom inside of my words, her eyes stare like I am a cruel beast heel bent on crushing her.  She passes judgement on me for playing virtual Janga (Ps. Boomblocks is the best game in the fucking world), and when I suggest she isn't so different she gets upset.  Its odd to me, and I think I figured it out.  She legimaitly doesn't like the notion of being dependent on technology, while not realizing how much it truly permeates what we do, a hater of it through and through.  I like that about her so much.

I am no longer looking forward to being at OU this year.

Disgust

I sat utterly disgusted at myself inside of my bed, flabbergasted at myself. I was a terrible human being, I was sure. I was so rich as to live in this prep boy club of an apartment complex! There is so much more space than most places.  What the fuck was I doing here?

Than I traced it throught my head when the change occured.  My mom got married.  

We were broke as a family ( I love how pretentious that looks right now), living on a trailer outside of my grandmothers farm. My mom was a shell of a person, paraylized with fear of raising three kids on her own inside of country, southern Illinois (its not rural fuck you, it was country to me).  She made the move that she had to go back to school, and we loaded up on goverment aid and loans and packed up to SIUC carbondale.  Fun time, a single mother with three kids trying to become a paralegal, or a typist for the courtrooms(don't know what they are called). With three kids at home, there were clearly a little fucked up.  We scream basic explination of a single family.

The Oldest kid is a hero.

The youngest is a mommas boy

The middle is quite.

We lived in a three bedroom apartment, and I have no fucking idea how we did it. Thank fucking god for food stamps, and thank god for student loans. She got a job and we left the apartment to a spacious shitty home, again three bedrooms, but southern Illinois but still. It was terrible.

For a while me and my brother during the summer were at a day care where I experinced racism for the first time directed at me.  I might talk about that later, but being the only white kid in a all black daycare, (actually one other white kid) and I was odd man out picked on quite a bit. A drug deal happened in front of the daycare while we were outside and we couldn't go back.  Than it was to biblecare, a worse hell. Eventually it was "I am going to die poor like this" from my mom (11 dollars an hour with all that debt and three kids). Big move up to STL.

We go to the lovely town and four. There was government assisted living on the other side of the lack. The weekend we moved in there was a stabbing on the corner of the street. 

It was awesome, finally other kids and close.  

Than it happened. We moved from town and four into a actual house, finally my own room. The quality of the house just went up and up.  This was during high school, where I had been raised with much less, to see such a drastic change progressively I missed it. Things were still broken, and my mom was working 50 hours a week at the lawfirm. 

Than she met Gary.  Than I got a laptop before I went to school, than we started to eat a lot better, than got a new stove, a new fridge. My moms car is pretty new and pretty nice. I can't tell if shes happy. I can't tell, and it makes me very very sad.

Isolated

A odd thing happened for me today, I up rooted my life and placed it somewhere new. For the first time thought, this caused some anxiety for me. I got sick of having to talk with everyone back inside of Norman, I got sick of my mother and my sister after having spent the large part of two days with them trapped inside of a car (one day in the car). So much so to the point of being anxious for them to leave to be back on my own, to be let go.

The night before I semi-broken into my apartment to sleep on the bed before it was legally mine, a place to crash so my mother and sister could sleep in there own beds at the hotel (or a retreat for me).  Immediately it was back to old tricks, as we lit up the moment they were in the car for the first time for me in my new residence.  My perception changed quickly about myself in a positive way in this particular interaction also for the first time.  I felt pretty awesome for how I was able to keep my GPA up with my study habits and behavior, but my other friends put themselves in danger of failing out.  Around this time I also realised I was breaking the law, and was scared that someone would catch me and I would be in big trouble.  Thankfully I have college friends to freak me the fuck out worse when this thought runs through my head, as the doorbell rings and it is loud as fuck.  Mumbling and rambling we get to the conversation of me being psychotic for the random shit I say.  but in a good way?

I don't know, I just feel very much un-like people I meet.  This makes me feel lonely =(