All Your Guitar Rooms Are Belong To Us

First I thought I’d wallow in some minor relationship angst. It’s sort of relevant to Gender and Games, because it sort of explains why I have the leisure to play them without getting in arguments with my SO about my gaming hobby.

So I’ve got this boyfriend. We got together over 9/11, he started out as my roommate while we were both breaking up with other people. We are both currently finishing up quests IRL. His has to do with family issues in the midwest and mine has to do with money issues on the west coast. Eventually we have plans to either go live together or break up or something. We also both hate phones and other reminders that we are far apart so we have this arrangement where we trust our intuition to tell us whenever anything alarming is happening, and because we have that, there’s no need to always be chatting about the weather and what we had for lunch the other day (yeah, it is a weird and nebulous relationship, but we are weird and nebulous people).

Anyway, he’s the kind of guy who, given half a chance, will fill the whole house with things. This is something I don’t really understand, because I have a hard time even buying decorative or non-functional items. I mean, in virtual reality I’m an art collector, but in real reality, I’m far to the utilitarian side, and it rarely occurs to me to buy anything I can’t eat, wear or install on the computer. I don’t mind if other people are into things, but if they are all over the place I feel somehow paralyzed. Even choosing to put one thing away means that I might uncover several other things near it that may drive me bats – like a stack of disorganized CDs in the wrong jewelboxes for one thing (before taking up with this dude I had them all alphabetical).

Now it’s been annoying me for sometime that I have something extremely precious – a rent controlled 2 bedroom flat in a good neighborhood in San Francisco – and one whole room of it is taken up by things.

So this weekend I decided to unilaterally annex and occupy BF’s room. All the clothes he left lying around are now stuffed in neatly stacked boxes, likewise the Playstation that might be dead, the handfuls of cryptic notes and the candleholders, improvised working out weights (such as the magnum champagne bottle full of sand) and non-functioning pens. All the guitars (we were referring to it as the Guitar Room at one point) are lined up along one wall, waiting for me to polish and restring them. And many of the things have been likewise stuffed into boxes, neatly labeled with his name. He got to keep the vintage beer cans (now boxed) but the sentimental wine bottles and the Valentine heart shaped box with one stale chocolate in it had to go.

Possibly this only demonstrates the huge gulf between us. We are an extremely mismatched couple. We have an age gap and a money gap and we don’t look like a couple at all. I am the organized one who has panic attacks if my bills aren’t paid on time, he is the disorganized one who only remembers his bills are due when bill collectors call and remind him. I am the techie geek, he’s the acoustic luddite. I used to be an insufferably PC journalist type from Northern California and he’s from a religious military family in a red state, and although we both rejected quite a lot of the “wisdom” inflicted on us from the people around us and found a mutually agreeable way to discuss politics easier than I did with my ex-husband (whom I 90% agreed with but we argued constantly over the remaining 10%), many of my friends could not be in the same room with many of his relatives without huge dramatic arguments happening.

But musically and emotionally we were always on the same page, and that allowed us to compromise on our differences. Especially musically. Even if I do break up with him I’d still love to do some producing and arranging on some of his songs.

Around the time we got together I had just invested some money and time in getting a dedicated recording computer and mixing board and peripherals and had taken a class in how to use it all, in between picking the brain of a producer friend who was one of the few people we knew that was weird enough to hang out with both of us. He in fact was producing our album, right up until the studio went bankrupt while we were recording it and lost our masters.

And in fact, it seemed as though everything in the world got in the way when we tried to record music. Studios collapsed, bar fights broke out (a memorable one at our last gig), our relationships broke up, planes crashed into skyscrapers and finally a small fluffy rabbit came into our lives (which meant that we had to put the guitars and the non-rabbit-proof cables in the Guitar Room, where they’ve lived in a disorganized mess ever since).

So we took some time off from the music, had some other adventures, got seriously involved in SWG together, then we separated about a year ago for our quests. One of three things will happen next: (1) we will break up, in which case I will need to have all of his crap boxed up for mailing and/or discarding; (2) we will stay together and move out there where real estate is cheap and we can just get a house with enough space to put a permanent studio in it somewhere, in which case stuff will still need to be boxed; or (3) either he’ll move back here or we’ll continue being nebulous, and I will convert the Guitar Room into a studio and put a new dedicated recording computer in there (he, uh, virused out the last one with something nasty he picked up from a site purporting to have naked pictures of Alyssa Milano). In which case all the crap needs to be boxed. If it’s ever unboxed again, I intend to give him set boundaries separating the space he can mess up with all his things from space that I occupy. And once I’ve got the recording computer I can rip and back up all the CDs so that naked unalphabetized CDs lying around the house in the wrong jewelboxes will no longer distress me.

However, since I won’t know which scenario it’ll be until next spring sometime, and I can’t comfortably justify investing any effort in getting everything all set up before then, I shall continue to be addicted to WoW for the time being.

Boxing it all up and getting it out of the way feels really good though.

And I’ll have plenty to do in WoW, since there’s a new expansion planned for next year. I’m actually excited about it. There’s going to be a new type of character, the Death Knight, so in a way I’ll have my dark jedi back. And ten more levels to grind!

I got my priest up to level 69 over the weekend. One more to go! I also took her in an instance, but that didn’t last long. It was a group of two guildies and three people from another guild. One of them started right in with rudely telling me how to play a healer. Then he died in a big fight, and I laughed at him, so he had a tantrum and started swearing at me, and I put him on ignore and my guildie and I left the group and teleported out of there.

I had heard from my anonymous ex-WoW playing friend that a lot of the time healers get no love in WoW, but this was the first time I had really seen it. Definitely a change from SWG, where my healer was definitely appreciated and where people died enough senseless deaths to game bugs that they don’t tend to get all pissy over it. I mean, not all WoW players are like that, but I’ve found a few that get serious attitude if they get killed, and blame it on everyone else, even if they’re trying something deadly and complicated. I mean, in the incident I just mentioned, the dude didn’t lose anything at all, not even time.

It’s similar to how a lot of noobish WoW players sit around demanding that a higher level player walk them through an instance (rather than assembling parties of people at their own level to fight their way through).

It’s probably because it’s such a popular game, and because it attracts a lot of people who never got their feet wet playing pen and paper role playing games and instead expect there to be console game type cheats that will make them invulnerable. But still, I don’t remember any of that happening in SWG, and in fact I was a lot more willing to help people work the game mechanics to level fast in SWG, because nobody demanded it or had fits if there was nobody available to instantly donate an hour or so of their time to helping some lazy noob advance.

Besides, grinding is probably the most engaging part of the game, for me anyway.

I wonder if I can get a level 70 in each class before next spring rolls around and I start shopping for a studio computer.