Mom went ballistic. Not that I made a friend, or even what kind of friend (Kelli is a little strange; to give you an idea, she goes by the nickname of “God”, which she has embroidered on several hats), but that we went over to her house after knowing her for little more than a few hours. After all, we could have been robbed or killed, or she could have been a plant for a rapist boyfriend and whatnot.
I don’t get it. Here I’ve been, moping around the house for months after DC leaves for Canada, whining about how I don’t have any friends, and I meet someone who’s fairly local and female and enjoys gaming, and is a geek in general and is desperate to meet people in the area, and Mom gets mad because we go to her house for an hour or so. While I agree that it would have been stupid had I done it by myself with a guy, I was with DC, in broad daylight, going to a fellow female gamer’s house. Apparently I’m not supposed to visit people until I’ve known them for several weeks or months, or have at least talked to them online for said period of time. Personally, I’d feel a hell of a lot more comfortable inviting someone I just met in real life to my house, than someone I’ve talked to online for months, especially since I was with a friend. Now the whole incident has made Mom slightly paranoid and suspicious of Kelli, who is in fact a lovely person with very well-mannered cats and draws quite pretty dragons. We all exchanged phone numbers, but I believe Mom would prefer that I contact her via the internet first. Mrrf. How frustrating.
I mean, this is so darn convenient! I’ve been dying to meet fellow gamers in the area, DC’s about to go back to Canada, and up pops the loveliest role-playing weirdo for me to befriend (and she’s a Buffy fan, too!). It’s frickin’ karma, man. Just because we went to her house right after meeting her, this casts a shadow over the entire situation.
And I’ve been so darn vocal in my desire to have a friend, too. For months--I kid you not--I’ve been whining and bitching about how my only friend is in an entirely different freaking country, and I hardly ever see her, and I can only talk to her once a week, and I wish I could meet local gamers and have geek friends in general. Mom kept telling me that I only had to be friendlier, and more social, and get contacts, and get a perm, and basically change my entire personality, and I’d be sure to meet people in no time! As you can see, we had regular clashes on the topic. And now here’s someone who dresses and acts and thinks like me, and is just as much of an oddball as I am, and Mom’s mad because we parked on her sofa for an hour or two? Oy vey!
You know what I think? I think Mom just wants me to be friends with the people my sister hangs out with. Sally has a great number of friends in community theater, and I get along quite well with them also, but I can’t really consider them my friend friends, for a very good reason: They’re all notorious gossips. I am not pointing fingers at any single parties, but rather making a broad generalization. Anything I tell them will eventually get back to Mom and Sally, which is hardly a way to build trust and long-lasting friendships. And a good lot of them spend their after-hours hanging out in bars. I’m not opposed to other people drinking, but I don’t like the taste of alcohol. It just tastes sour to me. And while being the only sober person in a roomful of people in various stages of inebriation provides transitory entertainment, after a while it becomes rather monotonous. I get very irritable around touchy-feely people, and alcohol tends to make people physically affectionate (not necessarily romantic, just huggy).
Also, I prefer people with interests in sci-fi and fantasy: geeks. I told Mom this, and she said that everyone’s a geek in some way (she’s a Lord of the Rings geek, believe it or not), but I mean like classic Spock-eared, lightsaber-wielding, role-playing, anime-watching, nitpicking geeks. People like the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons (he’s obviously my favorite character...well, him and Smithers). Maybe not quite THAT pathetic, but you know what I mean. Geeks, in the truest sense of the word. I want to befriend people like I saw at GenCon, which was like absolute Mecca: Gamers and geeks as far as the eye could see. I met all manner of interesting slices of humanity, all lunging dice and paper in my face, as thrilled to meet me as I was them. As DC has frequently noted, gamers are a different breed of person; they’re a subculture unto themselves, all very friendly, with a tendency to seek out fellow gamers with a scenthound’s talent and immediately latch onto them and talk shop. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into bookstores and toy stores, located a fellow gamer who I’ve never met before, and promptly dived into a deep and heartfelt discussion on the merits of this clan vs. that tribe, or on Star Wars and other geek obsessions (we geeks don’t just have interests...we have obsessions, and nothing short of automatic rifles will prevent us from happily blithering on about our pet obsessions).
That’s the sort of people I choose to be around, and I choose to have in my life. I just wish that Mom would understand this, and not immediately cut me off from potential friends simply because they’re not who she would choose for me. Yes, geeks are different and a little strange, but I know that they’re mostly jolly, friendly folk who are always happy to invite others into their fold--and apparently, even their home.
What's so wrong with that?