A-Typical male's journal.

Later I learned about the differences between introverts and extroverts, and the way they count friends. For me, friend is really synonymous with close friend. I have friends I'd got to bat for, no matter what. All they have to do is ask. Some of them are more recent friends, like Squirrel, Informer, and Lysistrata, but those Three, maybe Four are still on my list.

And the yearly get-together is our party.

Now, I've added people to that three, maybe four, and I've dropped a couple over time, but by the time I was in High School the group had solidified. Ozzymandias is the most recent addition, but he's just as firm as the rest.

We were the geeks, the nerds, the weirdos. We were the guys described in Radiohead's Creep {I'm a loser/I'm a wierdo/What the Hell am I doing here?} We are the Fellowship Of Lunatics for Insane Persons. FLIP For short. Don't believe me? Look at my card...

Somehow us sci-fi game geeks made it thorough High School, and dispersed for the winds. But we really were close friends. We still go together on breaks. Easter, Summer breaks, and Christmas. We gamed three or four times a year, but that was mainly an excuse to get together, and chat. Catch up. Some people go out to bars. We stayed in and gamed.

Blair moved away, and disappeared, until we found him again a few years ago. SirJohn pissed us off and didn't come back to we both grew up. He's in Erie now. So that leaves me, Ozzymandias, AJ, and Keith. We've added our SO's and a few new friends, but it's still the same. We don't do role-playing games anymore, but we still game.

We're geeks, like I said. We played canasta, and rook. (OK I watched those games played.) We played scrabble on the computer, and watched some Anime. We discussed Babylon 5's sell to TNT and Xena's "intermammary concavity". And thank the small gods, Azura fit right in.

Heather, my ex, never fit in with this group. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. While Heather is a geeky webgrrl, she wasn't (isn't?) as open minded as our group. This is somewhat necessary. The pagans outnumbered us non-pagans this year. Of course, none of the non-pagans agree with each other, so it's not worth arguing about.

Then there was the year that AJ brought her SO and her roommate. Ozzymandias, Keith and I pulled AJ aside and asked if we should rough him up some. I mean, he was necking with the roommate. This was before I'd worked out my own poly ideas. We still don't really know what was going on there.

Keith and I got along fairly well this year. I guess I'm getting over my hangups. He's finally playing guitar again, and I'm glad. I guess I'm protective of him, too.

Keith is repressed. I guess Ozzymandias is, too. We played a free-association word game, where the stated object is to say the first word that comes to your mind after the person on your right says their word. The real objective is to stay within the realm of cleanliness (I failed) and make an obvious (or not-so obvious) sexual innuendo. Of course, no matter what word you feed Keith, he interprets it sexually (well so do I!) and then he can't talk. Ahh, what lack of control.

We eventually set it up so that Azura hands me a word, then I hand it to AJ, and she handed it to Keith. It was like a laser withe a double focus, smacking Keith in the head. It was fun.

Afterward, Azura agreed with me that Keith is a bit repressed. "He may not be gay, though," she said. I'd hypothesized this because Keith seems obsessed with heterosexuality (and big big breasts) and a bit phobic about homosexuality. I think it's just his sexuality that he's afraid of now. I could probably come out without anything really bad happening. Maybe next year.

We had to leave midway through the game, to go get Dickens and let him out. We made promises to come back the next day, and left.

Generic Joe's A Typical Male