Today really began on the tail-end of yesterday. With classwork done and papers finished, I had gone to Fort Wayne yesterday evening to speak with a couple of friends about a game we were playing. The short version is that it is an online group roleplaying characters in a Game of Thrones setting. For me, the attraction comes from the medieval European politicking, not so much the setting itself.
In any event, I’d just had a long catch-up conversation with another player and a Game Master, since I’d been away from things for the last few weeks. It lasted until midnight, leaving me to begin my day with an hour-and-a-half long drive South from Fort Wayne back to my apartment in Muncie. My mind was reeling with information and ideas, freewheeling from a “I have to protect myself” mindset to a “You know, if I murder every other character…” kind of headspace. I barely pay attention to I-69 as I drive. It’s almost empty, and I’ve got 54 miles of it before I need to do more than coast. My music, a mix of the RWBY soundtrack for season 1 and folk songs by Father, Son, & Friends, is alternatively too loud to think and too quiet for me to pay attention to the words.
The last 15 minutes after getting of I-69 are hard. I am fading a little, and the lights through the streets are more jarring than helpful. The one benefit I have is that there is almost no traffic this late at night. I stagger into my apartment at about 1:30 a.m., grab a bottle of water, and go to bed. Usually I toss and turn for an hour, but given that I’m on my 3rd straight late night with less than remarkable sleep so far, I conk out pretty quickly.
I hate the sun. The sun is a smug jerk, who invades your house through your windows without permission and shakes you awake. I only really sleep until about 8:30, and wake up with a tangle of hair in my face. I toss my head around a little to get it clear of my eyes and remain in my bed. I don’t want to get up. Actually…I don’t HAVE to get up today. I pull the blanket over my face and try to blot out the sun. It works a little, and I doze without quite reaching the deeper levels of REM. I wake up occasionally, think about my character in Win Or Die (the name of the online game I’m playing). I’m trying to plan ahead, and make the new Queen understand that she needs the support of several players she has been alienating.
Eventually, I decide it’s worth it to get all the way up. I grab some clothes and wander into the bathroom for a shower. After the couple of minutes it takes to reach temperature, I step in and immediately feel the lingering strain of the week washing off of me. As I shampoo and condition my hair, I get the usual impression that not all of it is being affected meaningfully despite the near fistful of goop I have lathered into it. I’m so tired of my hair being long. I can’t wait to go home to my parents for the weekend so my father can chop it off and buzz me down to a comfortable fuzz. I’m tired of the maintenance, the extra sweat, and the split ends I’m getting every time I comb my hair.
By the time I get out of the shower, it’s almost 11. I decide to skip breakfast, partly because I have been bad lately about keeping breakfast-type foods stocked in the house. My sister is already off at work, so I throw a few hotdogs into some boiling water and plop down on the couch. Before too long, I have a quick (and somewhat bland) lunch, coupled with a Pepsi and some Goldfish.
I check my phone every few minutes. I have some kind of obsession with knowing what the time is at any given moment, especially when I have plans later in the day. I have to leave at about 5pm to make it to Fort Wayne at 6:30 for a meet-up with friends. To kill time, I alternate between Smash Bros., which increasingly infuriates me more than I actually enjoy, and Fallout 4, which I recently acquired for myself. It’s easy to zone out playing that game. I spend a lot of time building up my home base, struggling to get the happiness meter closer to full. Beyond that, I mostly wander around and snipe things from as far away as possible.
As it gets closer to 5pm, I realize I haven’t actually planned for dinner. I spend my last half-hour dithering over what I want, before settling on some chicken strips from Lee’s. I order my food, and the person behind the counter asks me if I am a Ball State student. To my pleasant surprise (and mild disgruntlement), I discover that there is a discount on student orders. Further inquiry leads to me realizing that this discount has existed for six months, and I had no idea. I could have been saving tens of dollars these past six months! I make a note to tell my sister about the discount, and to complain about not knowing sooner. After I eat my food, it’s back on the road for Fort Wayne.
Driving on I-69 during the day is a pain. I always get a little nervous on the on-ramp, and going up behind a semi-truck like today really sucks. Then, like 5 miles down the road, there’s a stretch of rougher pavement that makes a really unpleasant noise as I drive on it. Because of my timing, today I get to drive with my left hand up on my face to blot out the sun, which has decided to linger right in the corner of my window where the sun-screen/overhead mirror can’t block it. Today, I get to drive like that for an extra 9 miles because I need a different exit.
Coliseum Blvd. is terrible, but soon enough I find myself in the neighborhood of my friend’s house. We are doing a group reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, part of an annual ritual where we read a Shakespeare play. I have been cast as Demetrius, “a villain” in the sense of his ethics, as well as Mustardseed the Fairy. I drive down the street, and I’m pretty sure I overshot the house by a few hundred feet. (I had.)
I pulled onto the side of the street, pulled my chair and script out of my car, and trudged to the correct house. I was almost nine minutes late, but still apparently there before half of the remaining cast. On the one hand, I’m relieved, but on the other I can’t believe that so many people are late to this and why bother setting a start time and… My internal criticism and hypocrisy continue.
Eventually, everyone arrives and we (barely) fit everyone into the living room. As we read, everyone bring their own flair to their characters. I try to maximize my jerkishness while the guy playing Puck goes out of his way to sound like a scoundrel and a rogue. Oberon’s actor annoyed me greatly. He frequently mispronounced names, words, etc., and he lacked a consistent flow. For all that, however, I remind myself that this is meant to be fun for everyone and calling him on it will make exactly no one happy.
The best moment in our reading was ultimately an inconsequential scene. Titania calls her fairies to attention. The first announces himself ready, with the next three saying “And I.” The two fairies before me say “And I” in a giggly, high-pitched voice, so I (being a self-proclaimed funny person) dropped my voice low and said “And I” in a bored monotone. Everyone immediately broke up laughing, with Titania’s actress unable to breathe for a moment.
I’ll be honest, going through the play is pretty fun, though some parts toward the end seemed to drag quite a bit. It’s strange to consider how these plays were close enough to common vernacular in England 400 years ago that everyone got the jokes, as opposed to the relative minority who seem to understand them now. It’s nice to have a group of friends who like this sort of thing, and bring me into weird activities I might have otherwise not tried for myself.
After we finish, it’s time to run on home. It’s not quite dark out yet, but it’s close. However, I also have a craving for Dairy Queen. A 5-minute detour finds me pulling into an empty lot, wondering if it’s still open at 9:08 pm. It’s important, as I realize I hadn’t used the bathroom while I was at my friend’s house. I check the sign and breathe a sigh of relief before going in. The bathroom is…well it’s a single-toilet Dairy Queen bathroom, but it does the job.
I washed my hands and moved back out to the front counter. The prices were a little higher than they were in Muncie or Huntington, and I only had a couple dollars left on my gift card. I ordered a medium vanilla cone, hoping I wouldn’t end up a few cents short or something weird. The card goes through the slot, and it turns out I have 9 cents left. Works for me!
The girl behind the counter has a tired, vacant look. She gets me one of those near-closing cones, where they add an extra layer or so of ice cream because they can’t use what’s left for the next day. It’s a bit unbalanced, and as I carry it out to my car I’m working on making it more stable by eating the unbalanced parts.
Driving home to my parents on 30 is pretty thoughtless. I’ve done it so many times in the past that I barely notice the trip anymore. Traffic gets thick enough in Columbia City for me to pay attention, but otherwise I kind of drift blankly homeward. It’s not until I turn on to a country road that I begin paying attention to the home stretch. My usual road is partially obstructed by a flood (or at least it was the previous week), so I have to navigate a slightly longer and less familiar route. It doesn’t help that part of that is gravel road because Whitley County is too cheap to pave it.
It’s a nice feeling, pulling into my parent’s long driveway between the two lines of pine trees. I step out of my car, stretch a little, and grab my pillow, clothes, and backpack to carry inside. It’s only 10:30 on a Friday night, so both of my parents are still up, watching tv. They greet me as I come in, but they are partway through the last Maze Runner movie (the Death Cure?), which they have not seen. I talk with them a little about my week, and mention the haircut, but mostly we just watch the movie.
We have a lot of the same complaints about the movie, particularly concerning the stupidity of the protagonists. However, I push through to the end and decide I have had enough for the day. Close to midnight, I hug and kiss them both goodnight, make my way upstairs, and drag my mattress into position. The windows are open in my old room, and I kick the fan above me to get some airflow. It takes me a long time to fall asleep. I can’t get comfortable, and my pillow heats up quickly. At some point, I finally manage to lose the fight against sleep and get a few hours rest.