Today I received the first "packet" of entries for UPS' literary magazine published every semester, Crosscurrents. Within this packet there were four poems and one short story. From the time I have spent in UPS' creative writing department I have learned that most of the campus, and almost all of the professors, hate fiction that uses supernatural or "Romantic" elements in them. So when this short story mentioned orcs and ogres I was quite taken aback. Here at UPS, "the Harvard of the West" someone actually submitted a short story piece that included fantasy creatures/races. Now here's why I say that I'm a hypocrite. I love fantasy elements in stories, hell, the farther away from reality you can take me, the happier I'll be reading your story; yet when I found out that there were orcs and ogres in this short story I immediately cringed and prepared myself for the worst. The simple fact that this short story had fantastical elements made me assume that it was going to be, for lack of a better term, terrible.
I've often noticed the same sort of double-standard with my views on gaming culture; I like to talk about games, and would preferably decorate my room with gaming posters, but if I meet someone who has done so, when they start to talk about video games with me, I immediately push them away. I assume that they're too geeky to want to hang around with. All of this while I have daily conversations about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a game that epitomizes gaming culture (MARIO VS SONIC), with my roommate.
The worst part is that I have yet to be proven wrong.
The short story, while a great effort on the writer's part and I applaud their courage for submitting it (I have yet to submit anything myself, even anonymously), was not good at all. It didn't make me question anything, I didn't want to know who any of the characters were, or even what was happening. Worst of all, those fantastical elements were entirely unnecessary for the larger story, and even if they were they were never explained, the author neglects to mention what an Orc or an Ogre is at all, I can only assume that they meant it in Tolkienian fashion.
Even the people I have pushed away (albeit not entirely intentionally), have for the most part turned out to be people I actually would not enjoy hanging out with (or whose voice grates at my very soul).
Yet I still hate this part about me and feel that this tendency to push away those who start to resemble me too much is one of the worst parts of who I am at the moment. I wish I could fully embrace my nerdiness; walk into a lecture hall dressed as Mario with a Final Fantasy ringtone one my cellphone. I hate that I feel awkward and nervous about expressing who I truly am. Hell, even on my date on VD I managed to never say a thing about video games, and they only dominate a good sixty-percent of my life. Why? I was afraid that the girl would think I was a nerd, which is what I am.
Why am I so afraid to say I'm a nerd in public? Why do I hate talking to store clerks while buying video games enough that I almost solely buy online? Why can I talk about video games nonstop with my roommates or on this blog, yet in class I'll never even bring them up with my classmates? The answer is I'm afraid. I'm afraid to commit wholly to something, to reveal a bit of who I truly am.
This summer and winter break I had, at the very least, bi-weekly café trips with my mother where we would sit down and talk for sometimes as long as three hours. These discussions were so frequent that in order to keep them going I had to start delving into more and more personal subjects, and by the end I was talking about some of my greatest fears within half-an-hour of that first cup of coffee. To be able to talk like that helped me sort out how I felt about myself a lot, and it's led (with more than a little help from my Persona 3 catharsis) to massive improvements within myself as a human being. I mean for god's sake the guy who has never even held a girl's hand outside of a classroom was able to ask someone he barely knew the name of, out on a whim. That's the kind of change that I've gone through in the last year (not-even), and these discussions were a major part of that change. I'm still growing as a person, still looking to improve myself, and while I wish I had started earlier, I'm very happy with the person I see myself becoming before I graduate next year.
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