EPT====
Getting off the plane gave me a breath of relief, as did the rest of my team. We had all gone through a slew of political BS, rules changing on us damn near every day, and constantly getting in trouble for stupid shit that other people did. We were glad to be home, for more reasons than one.
When I got back, I expected to slip back into my routine of WoW damn near every day, but there were a few things that slipped my mind.
Putting on rank meant I had to move out of the dorms, meaning I had to find housing within Tucson. I had never done anything like that before in my life. This also meant I needed to get a car in order to commute from work to home. I panicked. I had about a week or 2 to do this. I called my mom and my stepdad to assist, and they actually came down.
I ended up with a fairly decent apartment for about 600 a month. It was a lot simpler a process than I anticipated, but it didn’t stop me from being shy regardless. The car was a lot more complicated, as I’m not a car person, I didn’t know what I wanted. After much indecisiveness, I went with a 2009 Scion XD. I ended up paying for it cash out of my deployment money. I was broke for a month or 2, but because I don’t drink my money away, nor do I smoke, I saved money at a silly rate.
After getting my stuff together, it came time for leave. During the time I was getting my car and apartment stuff, I was doing inprocessing and planning for leave. It was around the end of August/early September. I set up internet and played some WoW in the meantime. Trial of the Crusader had just been released, and it was being hailed as a damn joke.
The day before I planned to leave, I took a brief look at my itinerary. I had called an old friend to see if he wanted to meet up that weekend; I hadn’t seen him in about 3 years. We agreed to meet up at a McDonalds near my old high school at about noon. The day before we were to meet up, I planned on staying at a hotel or something, meeting up with him (He lived in the San Jose area), then driving back to the LA area to see the rest of the guild, especially Snowfruit.
Google Maps told me a 16 hour drive. I looked at the time. It was around 10 PM. Oh crap. I grabbed my crap and ran out the door. I had expected an 8 hour drive, as that’s about what I would have for the LA trip. It wasn’t exactly the smartest decision I ever made. I made it around 1-2.
He smiled as if nothing happened. Man, he was an awesome friend. We were damn near inseperable in junior high and high school. The times we were together, we got mixed up by our classmate, that’s how close we were. But something had changed after I moved to LA in Junior year. He got a girlfriend.
I was already wary of this due to Snorlaxs’ girlfriend. At the end of the deployment, the guild had already fallen apart. Chikyu, Snowfruit, Shuukuen, Loracaryn and myself were all looking for some more members to continue progression .
My friend had a distant look in his eye as we attempted to play catchup. We were already on the clock, I had gotten there late after all. He had work, I understood that. However, I still couldn’t help the feeling that he was in a rush to leave. In the past 3 years, I had not received any form of contact from him. I tried to keep the friendship going as best as I could. An occasional IM, Facebook post, something. I felt the unbreakable bond between us bend. He spent a good time talking about his life after I had left, most of it was about his girlfriend. His girlfriend, we had known back in Junior high, but she moved at the end of Junior high. She moved back after I had moved away (coincidence). They got together about that time.
I felt unsatisfied with the meeting. I really wish we had more time to talk, but he needed to get to work. We promised to meet up at AnimeExpo the next year. I had doubts about making it, but I would try. After we parted ways, I needed a next step. I had gotten there way more tired than I needed to be, and I needed a place to stay. Firstly, I updated my mom. Ironically, she had just moved into the San Jose area and was about to meet up with my sister. I met up with them and caught a cat nap as we all went down to LA together (well, in 2 vehicles, close enough).
I got to LA, and things kinda blurred together. I don’t remember the sequence of events clearly, but I’ll do my best. When I got to LA, we went to my aunts place to see her. She was my mom’s sister, and it was nice for the small reunion. I stayed there a couple of days before I went to my grandma’s place. I refused to stay with my dad.
I had stayed in meager contact with the guild. I guess it was finals week or something, like every other damn time I decided to visit (this wasn’t the first time I came back on leave and everyone was busy). I apparently am terrible at timing. We eventually set up a meeting at a local Macaroni Grill. I had a bad feeling about it, considering the issues I had to go through to get people to go. I called up a few other friends to come along too, notably xternal. He was the friend I had back in high school that recognized me after I came back. He was one of the few friends that actually tried to keep in contact with me, and I’m thankful for his dedication.
I had been there about a week and this was the first time I would see the guild in person in who knows how long. People had changed, in appearance, but more or less people were the same as they were online. The people in the guild stuck to themselves and the other people I invited stuck to themselves. The rift was obvious, whether or not they were willing to admit it. We chatted the night away and stuck around in the parking lot well after closing, discussing guild politics. In the end, Snorlax stopped logging on entirely, as did Sunsun and Deathise. I later found out they swapped back to their old server. We were down a tank, down a healer, and down a whole member. We decided it was time to drop the guild entirely and start over. We did.
I didn’t get a chance to talk to Snowfruit one on one. Everyone was busy talking to everyone else, but she was noticeably quiet. Everytime I tried to talk to her one on one, someone would come by and ask me a question or engage in a conversation. It was slightly frustrating, but it was the reason that I called everyone here after all.
She was entrancing to say the least. I couldn’t believe this was the same girl that had agreed to go out with me. If you looked at her from the outside, there was absolutely no sign that she was even a gamer. She looked like any other 20 year old girl at the time. One that focused more on appearance and such, than frivolities such as WoW.
I talked to her later online. Our conversation topics hadn’t changed after meeting each other face to face. Still talked about our personal lives and I tried to console her. She seemed unwilling to take the counseling. The conversation soon drifted to our next meeting. I had no idea what I was going to do, it was hard enough to get everyone together for one dinner, let alone just meeting on a less formal ground.
A week and a half passed. I sat in my grandmas place and played WoW. I was sickened. I had come back from a deployment but was essentially ignored. I was starting to get irritated, but I tried to keep faith. I broke a couple of days before the next meeting I was able to scrounge together. It was at a Korean BBQ place nearby, I apparently needed a reservation to get in, because it was so popular. I decided that I couldn’t stay anymore. There was no point in me being there I couldn’t hang out with anyone. I wasn’t doing anything different there that I couldn’t be doing in the comfort of my own home. The only person that came out to hang out was xternal, and he had to physically drive over to where I was to meet up with me. Everyone else was in walking distance, but focused on their test. Even half an hour or something, and I would have been satisfied. It didn’t happen. Sharing my concerns with them met with retorts about how I don’t know how stressful it is to be a college student. Fuck me right.
We got to the Korean BBQ place. It wound up that we were split between 2 tables. I had never been there before, I didn’t know any better. Chikyu, Shuukuen, Snowfruit and Loracaryn were at one table. xternal, myself, and a couple friends were at a different table. We were across from each other, but the split still made conversation impossible. They were joking about different BBQ combinations they were going to try. Apparently they came here pretty frequently. My table looked sheepishly back and forth at each other. Guess who was inexperienced. We got what the other table got and conversation casually started about various topics.
Today was already a special day. It was September 11th. It might be whatever to a lot of you, but I’m still military. I was in uniform even, that’s how important it was to me. At the end of the dinner, I held a moment of silence for the victims of 2001. I felt as if the guildies were more irritated at the gesture than touched. I didn’t care at that point; they had all but ignored me for the past couple of weeks. I broke the news to them that I was done with dicking around at that point, and was going to head back the next day. I was met with cries of indignation and non-comprehension as to how I arrived at my decision. I was little more than disgusted at their ignorance of how I would feel.
Snowfruit caught up with me as we walked outside, asking if I could stay for her birthday. Apparently it was in a week or 2. I thought about it and told her that I could stay for that, at least. My heavy heart lightened a bit, until I got home.
I got back to my grandma’s place and logged onto WoW like normal. People trickled on as they got home. As the night passed, it was just Snowfruit and I that were online. I asked her if she wanted to go to go get coffee together. This conversation alone would completely crush any happiness I had in the past months. (this is a gist of the conversation, it’s now how it actually went)
“um, you busy tomorrow? I was thinking we could get coffee or something if you weren’t doing anything”
“I’m not doing anything, but shuukuen has something going on during the morning, that’s the only time I’m free”
“I was talking about just the 2 of us, I can go pick you up”
“oh… isn’t that weird, just the 2 of us?”
I froze. My typing fingers suddenly got stiff, and I’m pretty sure the color in my face drained. The conversation droned on, and it eventually ended with her saying she misunderstood what I said about going out.
I left LA the next day. I barely spoke to anyone. I felt betrayed. There was nothing I could do. Thinking back, I wonder if going to that birthday thing could have changed anything. Instead, I broke down and my body took over.
The next couple of months involved me continuing to play WoW regardless of what had happened. I just grew more and more bitter. You know that arrogant guy that thought he could do anything? That was me. I would grow to get scared of that side of me; Sort of an alter ego. I felt invincible, and if I failed, it was never my fault. The guild took notice of it. I had 6 80s at that point. My Mage, my Hunter, my Death Knight, a Shaman, a Rogue and a Paladin. It was a personal goal to have an 80 of every class, and I was close. But it was a side project to raiding. We were progressing through ToC fairly decently, farming gear was more or less a convenience. I was gearing out my alts at that point as well. It sucked so much time out of my life.
We formed a new guild after I left LA. We tried raiding here and there, but due to my work schedule, shit started getting hard. My new commander (it had switched during the time I had deployed), changed my schedule to something even harder to keep up from a raiding standpoint. The day he changed the schedule was even worse.
I don’t know what happened, or why he did it. But he did it just as I was going into break. Right before I got off, we got the notification that there was a Commander’s Call. I groaned but figured it was nice to at least get it over with while I was still on base, rather than having to drive back. It lasted 7 hours. I had worked damn near 15-16 hours. I was not happy at all.
Amidst that, the only thing that gave me any joy was starting to grow frustrating. About the time Icecrown Citadel was released, I quit the guild. I severed almost all contact with everyone. Thinking back, I was being paranoid. I felt as if they were talking behind my back. They were downplaying the role I played in the world versus theirs. Hell, I must be a piece of shit for not being able to make the raid every week, because I worked at a weird time. That’s what I thought.
I joined a high end raiding guild on the same server, and progressed like crazy. I basically outgeared most everyone at that point, and I was getting satisfied. I was asked if I would ever quit. My answer was essentially, Not until I kill the Lich King. I came damn close.
I was pugging with my class leader when Icecrown was starting to open up different wings. We were both playing our tank alts, my Pally, his DK. The pug group we ended up with, would clear the entire thing that was available at the time.
This was an incredible feat. We were the 4th to kill Blood Queen on the server. Granted, it was 10 man, but still, it was astonishing our progress. This group would eventually join the main raiding guild, and assist us in our progression through 10 man.
However, despite the success in raiding, I was hurting. Snowfruit was on my mind damn near every day, and I couldn’t stop it. I took a step back, and felt horrible at what I was doing. I was looking up any information about her at the time, had access to her myspace page, knew she had a facebook account, could account for every piece of gear that she had changed within minutes. It was sad.
The Lich King was released. I could see the goal at the end. My super group hit brick walls as setting up raids were more difficult than I had anticipated, due to varying schedules, specifically mine. They were all casual-ish players that just happened to be good at the game, and refused to raid unless I was there. I was appreciative about the idea, but my schedule didn’t allow for it to be very conducive for progression.
We started progression on the Lich King. 90%. 70%. 40%. That was as far as I got before it happened.
I was pugging raids on all of my alts at the time. I had to change some names on my characters to avoid bad rap. My alter ego was getting worse and worse at the BM. Leaving raids for incompetency was not uncommon. Part of me knew this was wrong, but I did it anyways.
I saw my old guild pugging an Icecrown 25. I had tried to get into their raids before, but they told me straight up that some members were not willing to forgive me for leaving the guild so suddenly and without warning. I was indignant, but didn’t raise a fuss beyond that. However, this time was different. I was on my hunter, and had just changed my name and race. I was indistinguishable from my old hunter. They let me into the raid. I changed my name in vent to make sure they wouldn’t know it was me. We pushed through the first wing, no real issue. Chikyu was leading the raid, but I was disagreeing with how he was running the raid. I said nothing, you get used to stupid shit during pugs after all. We reached Festergut and shit got bad.
After no wipes in the first wing, we hit a brick wall at 6 wipes. 1%, 5%, 2%, 3%, 10%, 4%. I still had not said anything. They looked at the DPS charts and announced that I was not pulling my weight because I had not Flasked. I looked at my DPS chart and saw that I was about 10th. It wasn’t great, but I definitely was not last. I argued the point in chat about how come I was pointed out when there were people doing significantly less DPS than me. It was because I wasn’t putting forth the effort, they claimed. I dunno about you, but I hate flasking in pugs.
Chikyu traded me a flask. I denied it, but when a trade ends, it’s indistinguishable from whether it went through or not. We wiped again and he asked me why I had not flasked. 3%.
I spoke up in vent. I went into a tangent about how I was pulling my own weight, and it’s ridiculous why I’m getting pointed out when I was beating half the DPS. I left the raid, and logged out. I stopped to shed a tear.
I cancelled my account. This day was the last day I would play WoW. I posted on my current guilds forum to apologize for the sudden disappearance, but it was necessary to preserve whatever sanity I had left at that point.
The following weeks would be followed with apathy and boredom. I had nothing to do with my excess of time. I eventually filled it with the same thing I filled it with prior to WoW. Console games and anime. Life was moving at a snail’s pace. I still had not gotten over Snowfruit and still thought about her every day. I had stopped checking up on her, but rather lamented alone in my apartment. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, as it felt as if I needed to bring WoW into the conversation in order for it to matter, and I had essentially thrown away any friend I had that even played WoW. I felt as if no one would understand.
I got the notification I was deploying again. This time to Qatar. I felt apathetic about it, and didn’t have any negativity to the idea. I would be able to make it to AX, at least.
Predeployment training came and went. Drama here and there. The team I was with was full of new Airmen, and it showed.
The beta came up, and I wasn’t shaken in the slightest. I had played BW mildly at first, just like everyone else. Fastest maps, UMS and cheat codes through the campaign. Pretty normal childhood. My friend, stolen, got me into it, and I was hooked. I wanted to get better, and he showed me Day9. Within the time of the beta, I was silver. Currently, I am 700 diamond. A little bit after the beta phase 1 went down, AnimeExpo (AX) 2010 was drawing near. I bought a 4 day pass, I loved AX.
I called all my friends that were in the area and were either attending or might attend. I wanted to meet up with whoever I could. Notably was my friend from junior high. I felt the rift was bigger than I thought it was, but I tried anyways. I stayed at xternal’s place to avoid staying with my dad. If I stayed at my grandma’s place, he might stop by, and I didn’t want that. I went to AX and was almost obsessively calling my friend to meet up.
On the first day of AX, I went to opening ceremony and was nervously looking around for my friend. He had not showed up yet. I stuck around for a few hours until the convention hall opened up. He still had not arrived. When he finally arrived, it was around 1-2. I met him as he was getting his picture taken. He cosplayed Cloud, like he had every year. He was saying something about how he was waiting for his girlfriend (now fiancé). She was in a nearby hotel and I offered to tag along.
She was going through some drama with some friends she met on 4chan or something like that. I couldn’t follow the conversation. After about 10 minutes, they decided to go back to the hotel they were staying at to get her Tifa costume. Before I could say anything, he told me “I’ll see you later ok?”
I stopped. And said “Yeah, alright”.
I browsed the convention floor some more and left earlier than I anticipated.
The next day I attended a couple of events. Mostly browsing the convention floor. I saw my friend in a picture spam outside and tried to engage in conversation. His fiancé came up and dragged him back into the crowd. I attended a couple more events and went back.
I didn’t attend any more days. I was devastated at the lack of attention I got from whom I considered to be my best friend at the time. I stayed shacked up in xternal’s apartment and barely left.
xternal pulled me aside to talk to me occasionally. This helped a lot more than he might know. Simply having a friend be able to talk to me with a smile on his face was more rewarding than all the Lich King’s loot at the time. Amongst the topics we talked about was my future in the military, my WoW career, and what I would do in the future.
He knew me better than I knew me. He pretty much told me I didn’t belong in the military, and that I should be a college person. He knew I didn’t want to quit WoW, and the reason I stopped was a dumb reason to begin with. He was more or less able to guide me into figuring out a route that I could take for the future.
I was grateful for the advice. I left a little bit after AX ended. I ended my friendship with my friend out of junior high with an overly elaborate Facebook message. After all, he didn’t call me, I don’t see the reason to call him anymore.
The only thing that concerned me at this point, was my deployment. Not the deployment itself, but rather the day I was leaving. July 26th.
Yes, that’s right, I would have left the day BEFORE Starcraft 2 was released. Due to various occurances, we left a day later, and I was able to pick up my copy right before we flew out. Lucky break.
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That leads to today. I’m taking classes. I’m coming close to an associates in Criminal Justice (just as a courtesy, it’s not what I want to do when I get out).
My demeanor hasn’t changed much, and I’m still kinda bitter. Not as bad as before, but I’m still noted for looking angry all the time.
I ladder almost every day in an effort to do what I truly want to do, progaming. It’s a dream, and I’m still going to school as a backup, knowing how hard it is to break into it.
I still think of Snowfruit almost every day, it seems she’ll be an inevitable part of my mental anguish until someone new comes along.
This series of blogs was not a cry for help, nor do I expect any advice to help me at this point. This is an affirmation that some things I just need to say. It doesn’t matter to who, it just matters that I say it. Bottling up stuff is never good.
