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Three vaguely related recollections
Feb. 6th, 2015 04:59 pm1. So I grew up in Georgia and somehow managed to miss many of that state's redeeming features.
The Indigo Girls met and started playing music at the Decatur high school I passed on my way to ride MARTA in to get to Sword of the Phoenix; REM and the B-52s were I guess too edgy and Queer-positive for anyone in my high school to like, and my father's taste in music (classical and some jazz and folk rock) dominated everything at home; I never got to explore Five Points; down the way from me, some guys who were all afire to completely revamp how we saw roleplaying games (to be fair, they did a lot) started a gaming company called White Wolf.
Eventually I graduated high school and went to The University of Michigan. At the time, forging exotic out of state drivers' licenses was a quick way for underage students to get alcohol, so out of state students were instantly popular to talk to. The two questions I got most frequently were "where's your accent?" (my parents are New Yorkers, and my accent is some weird hybrid of Brooklyn/rural Georgia/metro Atlanta which sounded pretty midwestern even before I lived in Michigan for a while) and "do you like REM?" I'd be anxious to appease people and so I'd say yes to that second question.
This meant that when I started investigating pop music, REM was one of the first bands I wanted to try listening to, and of course since they were REM, they totally blew my mind.
2. These days I actually love playing the cleric. Clerics have awesome role-playing hooks as part of their religions, and when you're the cleric, the default action of healing allies starts out great - then you get to have some cool other spells, and you can still wade into combat or snipe from a distance in a way arcane classes can't.
When I was fresh out of Georgia, though, cleric was the role nobody wanted. This is enough editions of D&D ago that fighter classes and thieves got to do the exciting chunky damage, druids had limited healing abilities, bards weren't a viable option for someone who wanted to play with other personalities and abilities and still do healing, and you couldn't just buy up Wands of Cure Light.
I was also trying to be A Good Jewish Boy, because that's what my parents insisted and I hadn't thought to try anything else yet, which meant on Friday nights I'd trundle to Hillel and daven and walk back to the dorm. As the days grew shorter and Shabbas services started earlier, I'd start getting back in time to play D&D - but not quite back early enough to stake out the exciting ranger/thief/whatever roles. I got to be cleric a lot, ironically as a result of being religious.
3. I actually have had that quintessential Old Guy experience, Walking Uphill to School During a Blizzard. Here's how it happened;
As the inclement weather warnings rolled in, the University administration was in one of its periodic pissing matches with the TA union. The union's take on it was that no way were their TAs showing up to class and the administration ordered that there was going to be class those days, no matter what. So I walked from my spot off campus, uphill to class and man, it was cold and huh, that's a lot of snow and not a lot of visibility, but winters down south do not feature blizzards and I figured it was some sort of Michigan thing. It probably does it all the time here, right? By the time I got back from nearly empty classrooms and even more snow I found out that's what I'd been in, a blizzard.
The Indigo Girls met and started playing music at the Decatur high school I passed on my way to ride MARTA in to get to Sword of the Phoenix; REM and the B-52s were I guess too edgy and Queer-positive for anyone in my high school to like, and my father's taste in music (classical and some jazz and folk rock) dominated everything at home; I never got to explore Five Points; down the way from me, some guys who were all afire to completely revamp how we saw roleplaying games (to be fair, they did a lot) started a gaming company called White Wolf.
Eventually I graduated high school and went to The University of Michigan. At the time, forging exotic out of state drivers' licenses was a quick way for underage students to get alcohol, so out of state students were instantly popular to talk to. The two questions I got most frequently were "where's your accent?" (my parents are New Yorkers, and my accent is some weird hybrid of Brooklyn/rural Georgia/metro Atlanta which sounded pretty midwestern even before I lived in Michigan for a while) and "do you like REM?" I'd be anxious to appease people and so I'd say yes to that second question.
This meant that when I started investigating pop music, REM was one of the first bands I wanted to try listening to, and of course since they were REM, they totally blew my mind.
2. These days I actually love playing the cleric. Clerics have awesome role-playing hooks as part of their religions, and when you're the cleric, the default action of healing allies starts out great - then you get to have some cool other spells, and you can still wade into combat or snipe from a distance in a way arcane classes can't.
When I was fresh out of Georgia, though, cleric was the role nobody wanted. This is enough editions of D&D ago that fighter classes and thieves got to do the exciting chunky damage, druids had limited healing abilities, bards weren't a viable option for someone who wanted to play with other personalities and abilities and still do healing, and you couldn't just buy up Wands of Cure Light.
I was also trying to be A Good Jewish Boy, because that's what my parents insisted and I hadn't thought to try anything else yet, which meant on Friday nights I'd trundle to Hillel and daven and walk back to the dorm. As the days grew shorter and Shabbas services started earlier, I'd start getting back in time to play D&D - but not quite back early enough to stake out the exciting ranger/thief/whatever roles. I got to be cleric a lot, ironically as a result of being religious.
3. I actually have had that quintessential Old Guy experience, Walking Uphill to School During a Blizzard. Here's how it happened;
As the inclement weather warnings rolled in, the University administration was in one of its periodic pissing matches with the TA union. The union's take on it was that no way were their TAs showing up to class and the administration ordered that there was going to be class those days, no matter what. So I walked from my spot off campus, uphill to class and man, it was cold and huh, that's a lot of snow and not a lot of visibility, but winters down south do not feature blizzards and I figured it was some sort of Michigan thing. It probably does it all the time here, right? By the time I got back from nearly empty classrooms and even more snow I found out that's what I'd been in, a blizzard.