Forsaken

I love my boyfriend a lot but he is extraordinarily forgetful.

He’s constantly forgetting to call me, or forgetting things I tell him, or forgetting plans we’ve made sometimes. It has reached the point where I wonder if he’s missing the part in his brain that helps him remember things of relatively low importance. I wouldn’t think it’s normal for somebody to forget so much.

This evening he started a game on League of Legends, which I occasionally play with him if I’m feeling particularly nerdy. None of his friends were online, so I suggested he call me back and we could play a couple of games together when he finished the game he had just started. He seemed keen on the idea, and I said to him “call me or skype me after your game, but don’t forget about me, because sometimes you forget me and then I’m sad.”

“Okay, babe,” he replied.

An hour later I log onto League and see that my darling Sam is 15 minutes into a new game. I call him up. He asks me why I sound sad.

“You forgot about me,” I said sadly.

“No I didn’t, babe, I never forget you.”

“We were going to play a game together and you were going to call me and you forgot.”

He remembered then. There was much laughing and I’m assuming forehead slapping on his end. He offered to play the next game with me.

“I don’t know,” I said mournfully. “I don’t know if I can let myself trust you again.”

It’s our three year anniversary this weekend. I sure hope he doesn’t forget that.

Cause of death: FRUSTRATION

Grab your popcorn, friends, it’s time for a rant.

My boyfriend, Sam, and I live in different cities, and have done so for nearly two and half years. We see each other usually every weekend, but sometimes only every second weekend. By no means is it a long time to go without seeing one another, but it means that, to me, good communication is very important.

It’s in my nature, I think. I want to have everything out in the open, and if I have a problem I want to talk it through until we’ve reached a solution, or until we both just feel happier. I want to know about his day and I want to tell him about mine, because I believe we should know what’s going on in each other’s lives – and this includes the small, insignificant things, like the fact that I got tooted at by a creepy guy in a van today while out for a run, or that Sam got given a free pie from a girl at the bakery that I have never met but have decided I do not like because surely only an evil temptress would give my boyfriend a free pie. (my flatmate and I have discussed the matter at length, and decided that pie girl is surely Satan in disguise.)

So Sam and I talk on the phone a few times a day during the week when we don’t see each other. Most of our calls are short and sweet, because Sam is a man of few words (except when his video games are going badly), and even though I can talk a lot about a little, I have my limits. Usually he’ll just call me to say he loves me, and then he’ll be off again, and we have a longer call at night before bed where I tell him about my day and ramble on about meaningless things and try to coax a few words out of him.

Last night , as I was telling him about my cat scratching me, I received no response. This is not unusual with Sam. A lot of the time he doesn’t have anything to say back and/or can’t be bothered thinking of something, and a lot of the time he simply isn’t listening. The not listening thing bothers me quite often, because it gets hard sometimes trying to have a conversation with somebody and having to repeat everything to them when they finally start paying attention.

This time, Sam wasn’t listening.

“I was reading something,” he said sheepishly.

I explained to him, briefly, that it was important to me that he paid attention and stop distracting himself while I was talking to him, because I hadn’t spoken to him much that day and it discouraged me from speaking at all when I never got a response.

“Awww babe,” he said sympathetically. “Okay.”

A little while later, I said something else to him. No response. He was reading something again.

“Sam,” I said, “we talked about this before, and we’ve talked about it a lot of times before that. You said you’d stop reading stuff on your computer while I’m saying something to you.”

“Well, I did stop reading for a minute,” he said.

A little bit later, when he’d turned off his computer and gotten into bed, I was saying goodnight to him. He mentioned something about me being irritated with him, and I said “Well, you have done a lot of things tonight to warrant me being irritated with you.”

No reply.

“Sam, are you listening?”

“Oh, I was reading. I’m playing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on my phone.”

The irony was not lost on me that he had, again, not been listening, as I was explaining that he had been irritating.

“Sam!” I said incredulously, “am I so uninteresting that you have to find something to do while I’m talking to you?”

He insisted that I wasn’t boring, he just liked having something to do. I reminded him what I’d said earlier about how it discouraged me from talking to him at all, and you know what? He didn’t remember me saying that. He wasn’t listening when I said that. His “awww babe” was an automatic response, because his brain could half tell that I was unhappy about something.

I don’t actually ask for much from him. I like to talk to him at night when he’s turned off his computer, because that usually means there’s nothing else to distract him. I really struggle trying to get him to put aside 20 minutes of his day to give me his undivided attention. Sometimes he does it, and it’s great. But for the most part, there’s always something there, dragging his attention away. Something that he put there himself. A game, usually.

Am I really that boring?

The chase

Our pet cat is a bit different from others. I’ve just spent the last ten minutes playing a weird version of hide and seek with him, where I run down the hallway and hide in one of the rooms, and he comes shooting after me. Then I run into the lounge and crouch behind the couch, and moments later he dashes into the room, trying to find me.

I’ve never had a cat that actually chases me when I run and hide. He is truly peculiar. He doesn’t seem to get tired of this little game either, he loves it. Everywhere I hide, he comes running to find me. On the off chance he misjudges and starts looking for me in the wrong room, I hear a plaintive meow from somewhere in the house, and have to call his name so he knows where I am.

I tried catching some video of our little game on my phone, but as I have discovered, my film skills are shockingly poor.

I think Tonka is a dog, trapped in a cat’s body.

A gamer’s girlfriend

So, you’re going out with somebody with a mild to serious addiction to video games. Don’t worry, I’ve written up a helpful guide to ease you into the life that awaits you.

1. You may not have seen him for two weeks, but even though he probably misses you in his own way, the first thing he’s going to want to do when he sees you is sit down for a couple of games. Be prepared for this every time you see him.

2. If you want some cuddles, you have to accept that you’ll probably need to let him use your leg or back as a platform for his computer mouse. Stay very still.

3. When you ask him what’s on his mind, don’t expect “You” to be the reply. In my case it’s usually either games or food. 

4. After a while, you’ll be able to tell simply from the way he answers the phone whether or not his game is going well. If it’s not going well, don’t expect much conversation.

5. While we’re on the topic of conversation, be aware that most of what he does tell you will be about a play he made in his favourite game. You’ll need to master the art of sounding interested and engaged, while not really understanding or being able to picture what he’s talking about.

6. When he gets together with friends and takes you along, there will be an explosion of nerdery. Good luck getting him to talk about anything other than games.

7. You’ll start to pick up his slang and catch phrases. Before long you’ll be booming “SAPLING TOSS OP!” while you’re playing Maokai on League of Legends, and then you’ll bury your face in your hands and cry as you realise that you’re playing League of Legends.

8. You’ll start getting better at all his games – better than other people at least. You’ll never be able to beat him though. He always wins.  Soon you’ll be playing these games in your own time. This is a hard truth. Don’t fight it.

9. Seek revenge on him for the monster he has made you into.  

The game of kings

There’s this little game we used to play in primary school that was perhaps the most epic game of all time: Bullrush.

Bullrush involves having one or two people in the middle of the school field, and the rest of the class running from one end to the other and trying not to get tackled. If they get tackled, they join the kids in the middle and start trying to tackle the rest of the kids when they run back. The game ends when there’s only one person left that hasn’t yet been tackled.

I just read a news story this morning saying that a Christchurch principal is bringing Bullrush back to his school, since it was banned in the 1990’s. This is news to me, considering that I was playing it at my primary school in the early 2000’s.

Still, good on this guy. He believes NZ children are overprotected now when it comes to rough and tumble games like this. I’m inclined to agree with him. Sure, I sprained my wrist once playing it, and once I got dragged on my stomach halfway across the field after I tried to tackle a boy but just ended up latched onto his arm while he continued to run, but it never did any permanent damage, and it was ridiculously fun.

Those children at that primary school are lucky buggers.

Flashbacks

My flatmate’s family came to visit today, which was nice.

We all sat in the living room watching as her little brother and his friend devoured numerous bags of lollies that they’d bought from Armageddon.

And so began the age-old game of open-your-mouth-and-let-me-see-if-I-can-throw-a-jellybean-in-there. As was inevitably going to happen, my flatmate lost a lolly somewhere down her shirt, and as she wiggled around and awkwardly fumbled through her clothes trying to find that elusive lolly, I was taken back to a time in my childhood, long ago, when I’d befriended an ant, named him Anthony, and let him crawl onto my hand.

Anthony eventually crawled up my sleeve, and try as I might, I never managed to find him after that. Not unlike Anthony, that lolly disappeared down my flatmate’s shirt, never to return.

Oh Anthony. Where fore art thou Anthony?

Wrathful nerds

You know, I’ve realised a little something about nerds. They are terrifying, volatile creatures.

I’m not being nerdist – my boyfriend is a nerd. That being said, you can’t tell from looking at him, considering he’s six foot two, is built to match his height, listens to metal music and rides motorbikes. Of course, if you’re looking at him at the right time, you will be able to tell, because chances are he’ll be nerding it up on one of his favourite games, League of Legends, otherwise known as LoL.

LoL is surprisingly popular; it seems like every new person I meet plays it. Even I play it sometimes – not that I’m particularly good, I spend most of my time playing against computers because real people scare me. Now, you may laugh at that, but the truth is, I believe I have reason to fear them, for you see, nerds are crazy.

Sam and I decided to rage up a couple of games of LoL last night – beginner bots, nothing difficult – when he decided to do what boys do best, and be outrageously obnoxious to the rest of our team.

For those of you who play LoL, you’ll know that only one person goes along the middle lane, and that’s usually called while the team picks their characters, or ‘champions’. Sam decided to tag along with the mid player, and refused to go away. While that would be incredibly annoying, their reaction was a little more psycho than I’d expect in a beginner bots game.

I’ve never understood how people can play the game properly when they spend the majority of it furiously typing badly thought out insults at eachother. I lost count of how many times the word “douchebag” was thrown around, or “pussy” for that matter. I stayed silent, more because I find it difficult to type and play at the same time than because I didn’t want to get into an argument.

Still, at some point, after they taunted him about playing a beginner game when he was a high ranked player, he confessed he was playing beginner with his relatively unskilled girlfriend. Enter Melissa into the fray. Despite my taking the high road and deciding against calling anybody names, they still spent the rest of the game saying I must be fat and that I probably had a penis.

I was playing a champion called Tryndamere, a.k.a ‘the barbarian king’; this big manly guy that drags a gigantic sword along the ground behind him, so it didn’t take them long to start saying things like: “She’s playing Tryndamere, must be because she wishes her man was like that”. The funny thing is, if they saw Sam in real life they probably wouldn’t be so rude, because he can be a wee bit scary looking when he wants to, and let’s be honest, they were probably a group of overweight 12 year olds that only recently learnt what the word “douchebag” actually means.

Either way, nerds get mean. Real mean.

Bless their little, chubby hearts.

Unfair comparisons

My mother just looked at me happily playing Pokemon on my computer and said something unforgivable.

“That’s just as bad as playing Farmville.”

No, Mother, it is not.

On one side we have Pokemon – lovingly crafted from the tears of an angel-unicorn hybrid baby, and on the other side we have the spawn of Satan, which, not unlike a certain, well-known ring, can only be destroyed by returning it to the fiery pits from whence it came.

Farmville. Ugh.

When my Mum first discovered it our whole family fell into its clutches. While I got bored of it fairly quickly, it took my Mum a long time to tire of it. And I mean a long time. If she had to go out somewhere, she’d remind me to go harvest her crops for her at a certain time. I’d set an alarm on my phone.

Maybe I’m being overly harsh, maybe Farmville isn’t so bad. But that’s beside the point. Comparing Pokemon to Farmville is sacrilege of the worst kind.

On a side note, Mum’s great. (She wanted me to say that so people know I still love her.)

Board games: the silent predators

Never underestimate the power of board games to create hatred in places it has no business being.

Every time I play a board game at my boyfriend’s house, somebody gets grumpy. I’ll be honest though, it is usually me.

Perhaps the worst game of them all is Risk. I mean, sure, in Monopoly you’re taking the properties other people want; snatching their money out from underneath their noses, and in Scrabble you can always sabotage someone’s next turn by spoiling the spot they were eyeing up. But Risk. Oh, Risk.

For those of you who haven’t played it, Risk involves placing little armies over a map of the world, then trying to attack everyone else’s armies in order to achieve every super villain’s desire, WORLD DOMINATION. The amount of continents you take over controls how many extra soldiers you get on your next turn, so if you capture a continent, you can be damn sure somebody’s going to try and take it off you before your next turn comes around. The annoying thing is, they only need to seize back one country within that continent to rob you of the extra soldiers you were hoping for.  That, I think, is where the most conflict lies.

You have not experienced true rage until you’ve had someone steal a continent from you several times in a row.

Then we have the ‘table talk’. This is where your skills of persuasion come into play. You’re simultaneously being the angel and the devil on the other player’s shoulder, coercing them into attacking someone else – whether it’s because you don’t want them attacking you, or because that ‘someone else’ is a significant threat to you. As a result of this, half of the game is usually spent with people trying to convince each other who to attack, and how to do it. And boy does that ruffle some feathers.

So perhaps Risk isn’t the best thing for strengthening bonds between people. My boyfriend usually forbids me to so much as touch him because he gets so grouchy at me, and many a game has played out with people sitting in sullen silence and shooting dirty looks at others across the board.

Maybe we should just play Ludo.

Pokemon blues

Waiting to see if the pokéball has actually caught the pokémon must be among one of life’s most nail-biting moments.

You can never really know, you see, until it sits still and plays that little victory tune to tell you the pokémon is yours. I mean sure, it may look like all is going well. You may have gotten it down to the lowest possible health, you may have even paralysed it or put it to sleep, but that moment where the pokéball rocks back and forth could go either way.

As a child I was convinced that the key to ensuring the pokémon’s capture was to furiously and repeatedly mash the B button.

Now I’m not so sure that did anything at all except give me sore thumbs.

I’m practically a grown woman now (Or maybe I can’t be if I still inwardly chuckle when calling myself a woman), and I still get a fright when the pokémon, which I thought I’d safely caught, suddenly bursts back out of that ball, hell-bent on revenge. Or, you know, escape.

Maybe instead of getting a fright from that, I should be worrying that I’m 20 years old and still playing pokémon.