You know, public education does kinda suck. There just isn’t enough time or enough students interested in the subjects to cover interesting things in depth. It’s all about getting nice numbers on your report cards. Thanks to decent study habits this semester (in comparison to the last few semesters, anyway) I’m doing pretty good and might be able to haul my average up from 84% to ~90% which is worth an automatic $2000.
See that? That right there is public education at work.
Anyway, in french immersion here, you do a french language course first semester each year then a social studies course second semester. In grade twelve, the second semester course is sociology. We’ve got a nice big textbook, but I find there’s hardly any information about the most interesting stuff because the curriculum is god :/ The most interesting concepts get only the briefest mention.
While reviewing the notes I made to study for my tests, the tests themselves, and summarizing them yet again to get it all lodged in my long term memory, I found one of those interesting concepts we barely looked at in class. A little line about how social institutions - religions, schools, communities (yes, that also applies to online communities like forums, and even more so to MMO’s - but that’s a topic for when I finish Synthetic Worlds) - are created by people, but as they grow and develop start to influence the people who belong to it. The idea should seem pretty logical just by giving religion as an example, because the original incarnation of Christianity was likely very different from the one that we know today. As more people entered the church, the religion changed, and it in turn changed the people who would join in the future. That’s interesting enough on its own.
What really got me thinking was how it applies even on a smaller scale, to individual relationships. A relationship is much like an institution, in the way its dynamics change how you act or perceive others, but that’s pseudo-intellectual swaggering on my part and of absolutely no real interest unless you’re doing a study on the dynamics of human interaction. Back to the interesting part, people create relationships with eachother, on purpose, by association with others, or out of necessity. As we get closer to the people we meet and the relationships grows and changes, we become different people, often better people if we’ve made good connections. Through our contact with diverse and interesting individuals, we become greater than ourselves, which then influences the relationships we make and how we act towards the people we already know.
Most of my development as a person has come from that, though at a younger age it came mainly from myself, which I’ll talk about when I get around to comparing my life to that “Depression’s Upside” article. I can trace who I was and who I became by looking at the relationships I’ve made throughout my life, and when it comes to milestones in my life, most of them revolve around who I knew and where I spent my time. I’d like to think my presence in some of the communities and groups of my youth helped others the same way they helped me collectively, but I doubt it. Likely they were older and less impressionable, not to mention I avoided drawing attention to myself. Well, except on the forums of NewAge3, where I tried fairly hard to make a name for myself as a master debater and badass pseudo-intellectual. I never made any lasting connections there, though, and that’s probably why I never moved beyond the level of “familiar name” to “guy everybody pays attention to.”
As far as individuals go… Max and I plumbed the depths of the internet (gaming, too) together, and my early history of online usernames can be traced back to him (Hunter/Assasin, Hobby/MasterAssasin, Nohbody/Lunacy). That’d be about age 7-11 or so. I found NewAge3 in fourth grade, and I remember playing soccer and trying to tell him about how cool it was - I stabbed a guy in the toe for a thousand damage! - only to have him hate it for being text-based. I quit on and off over the years and as the game was reset, but I got pretty heavily into the forums from 8th-10th grade and spent many hours arguing on there while maintaining an MSN conversation or two. The other important thing there is the start of my interest in browser-based games, which is important in a lot of ways depending on the game.
Around that time same time (10-11), I also started playing Magic: the Gathering and met some pretty cool dudes there, most notably Sebastian who happened to ride my bus when I got to junior high. Loners half by choice and half by necessity, because nobody wanted to sit with us (joke’s on them, they sat three in a seat while we were comfortable with a seat to ourselves), our twice daily conversations about interests few of our (or at least my) friends shared became probably the closest friendship I have with a guy. I remember tentatively mentioning webcomics, but never by name - wouldn’t want to come off as a huge nerd, after all - only to find out he reads it, too, and discuss our favourite recurring jokes in the ones we shared. Good old 8-Bit Theater. Always up for a five hour rambling MSN conversation or a weekend long hanging-outing, his influence on me is equal parts maturity/trying to impress an older person and silly internet things/video games.
Of course, the big one is obviously Brittany, the only girl I’ve ever managed to maintain a friendship with (average lifespan of my friendships with girls is about two weeks, they lose interest after that), which began in eighth grade. It started off silly, but ended up being the most serious part of my life, and for a long time my routine was simply to come home and hop on MSN all night. Usually we’d stay up later than we should, then I’d get up early and hope to catch her online before she went to catch her bus. Repeat the process for years, barring the odd couple of months here and there where things weren’t great and we likely only spoke to eachother to be rude, if at all. I couldn’t even begin to describe the ways I’ve changed and the things I’ve learned about myself, about life, about other people… Suffice to say there’s no way I’d be who I am today if it wasn’t for that plot to find another guy’s e-mail address without making it obvious that she liked him.
The shortest relationship to change me as a person, without a doubt, would be one Mr. Vael Victus. Here’s one way that browser-based games affected my life - brought me to MonBre a little over a year ago. There were, I don’t know, maybe 12 users or less when I first joined? Vael was pretty discouraged and was considering giving up on MonBre at the time, and some wild impulse to help someone and give my life a purpose again made me write a big post trying to convince him not to give up. I’ll be brutally honest, I was depressed and lonely, and I wanted a part of that satisfaction of making a difference and being integral to someone else’s life that I got from being with Britt. It made me feel good to help out with MonBre. Again on that same random impulse, I sent Vael a message telling him to add me on MSN, and ending up making a new xfire account simply to talk to him. Our conversations are mainly characterized, for me anyway, by that familiar black window. Without the bright and inviting colours of MSN, talking on xfire somehow feels more formal to me XD I resist the urge to be super correct about my grammar like I used to be, though, because that was a significant change in my life at the time when I got comfortable enough with people and used MSN enough to get a little lazy with my spelling and grammar.
Outside of MonBre, talking to Vael about life and philosophy has simply made me a better person, in the same way that working at a successful relationship with Britt made me a better person through conversation alone. I’m even more open, accepting, and easy-going than I used to be, which is weird because I never lacked those things before, but there’s some subtle difference I can’t quite identify. Honestly, I’m pretty glad I followed those random impulses. By that same token, I think I’ll be pretty glad I followed the random impulse to propose meeting Vael this summer, ‘cause that’s just something awesome a lot of people wouldn’t do, much like my help with MonBre was supposed to be.
This post created entirely as a shout out to the people mentioned above as well as an invitation to others to look at their own relationships in the same light. Conveniently also to cheer me up, and hopefully them, too.