For all my life until I was about 20 years old, I only ever really had one or two close friends at a time. I was an introvert who was really, truly interested in only two things: hockey and video games. It was normal for me to spend most of my time with one person; I certainly wasn’t gay. I was that kid who would talk to a girl and fall instantly in love with her; daydream about how we were going to date – graduate high school – get married – have kids – die old together.
Despite my knowing that I have always been straight, this realization of what other people probably thought of me was devastating. How could I ever get a girlfriend now that they all think I’m gay? I won’t even be in the dreaded “friend zone”, I’ll be in the GAY ZONE – without a chance to realize my dreams of my fairytale ending. This greatly affected the way I thought about myself and my confidence in talking to girls, honestly, until probably around age 23.
After I broke up with my first love, I had a year of being single in which I found myself and found confidence. I realized that the age-old saying is true – you have to be happy by yourself before you can truly be happy with someone else. All of this to say, there is nothing wrong with any sexual orientation, but being typecast as anything you are not, can be tough on anyone.
Anyways, enough of the poor sad story of my youth and terribly low confidence. There is one thing I was sure I was confident of, and that was my gaming prowess. I may not have ever been a top player in any game, but I’ve always been extremely efficient. When these guys at school were talking about how slowly they were progressing through the game, I took that as a challenge that I wanted to conquer. I knew I could impress a couple of casual gamers, and this would make me cool! OK well hindsight is 20/20… maybe that’s not what makes someone “cool”.
That Friday, I bought the game everyone was talking about. I went out to Gamestop and bought a month of game time. I couldn’t let my parents know that I just bought a game that requires a monthly fee; they would never let that happen! So for the first few years of playing it, I would sneakily ride my bike to the store and buy a 60-day game subscription card so that I didn’t have to ask my parents for their credit card for the subscription fee.
As soon as I got home that evening, I installed it… which meant I wasn’t able to play that night. Let me explain, this was a game that came with several discs just to install it. Computers were much slower in 2004 than they are today, and even my custom built PC took hours to install this game. By the time I put in that last disc and completed the installation, I was passed out in my computer chair, drool seeping down my chin.
I woke up Saturday morning and logged on for the first time and eagerly selected the server my friends were on, “Kalecgos”. Although, at this time the server was actually listed as “ Kalegos”. Blizzard Entertainment had left a typo in, and months later they revised the server name to the correct Kalecgos, of the Blue Dragonflight.
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