Finished Demos: I Am Just Waiting In a Room

Edit: Sometimes I'm completely wrong. I am just waiting in a room comes from the A Wilhelm Scream song "the Horse", which itself, echoes Fugazi's Waiting Room, in terms of lyrical content. The character in Fugazi's Waiting Room is patient, waiting for his moment. Function is the key inside Fugazi's waiting room.



I've always thought of this as an Eleven Names post, but it just had to go through the school newspaper first. Here, then is an expanded version of my latest column. It's about knowing when to leave and who to leave the group to.

Happy Valentines Day. For some of us, it's good. For some, it's not good. I will have a significant other on some Valentines Days and I won't on others. From this perspective, Hallmark and Hershey's fingerprints on the holiday seem far more tolerable. If you must call it Singles Awareness Day, go for it. There's a girl I ought to kiss tonight, but never will, despite the fact that I have her phone number and instant messenger handle. Sigh. Beyond all that, I went to bed at 7 a.m. last night, flushed after finishing a bottle of Absolut Vodka with a group of friends, just talking and playing videogames. I would have never seen or expected that kind of a wonderful night/morning the night before I arrived on campus in 2005.

Maybe four years ago, the night before I arrived on campus, I lay on a hotel bed somewhere in Northwest PA, staring at the ceiling, wondering what my first day would be like. I wanted then to find a group of people that I could relate to and grow with. What I found was not at all what I expected. I was initially disappointed. Shit, I've played so much Dungeons and Dragons it's wonderful and disgusting. Never thought I'd do that. I initially resisted. Now, I look forward to those roleplaying times. In this group, I've found (and hopefully) help found a place where conversations, stomach turning, high minded and honest can happen. I've found that and help keep that group going.

The title is a line from Fugazi's song Waiting Room. If you don't know it, then learn. In a manner like Fugazi, four years ago, in 2005, I was also waiting in a room for the next part of my life to begin.

So. This isn't my goodbye to the group. That will come in a couple months, and even typing that phrase sends shivers down my body. But it's my, it's your's now lecture. Just go for it.

I'm far too cynical.

As many of you have guessed, I am a member of the social group. I'm also a second semester senior and, in theory, know when it's time to go. Parents and recent grads tell me that if the college has done a good job you'll want to get out. And I do. I want to leave and achieve things. I'm reasonably scared but there's also something less fashionable to admit: I hope I can bow out gracefully and acknowledge that my time has come and gone.

This occurred to me when I realized I was being unbearably haughty to a new kid who wanted to join the cluster of overlapping Venn diagrams that is my extended social circle. He's excited about the possibilities of the social group and the fact that it is not like where he came from.

My friend and I chastised him for being so excited.

I'll repeat that: I chastised him for being excited. Seriously. That was ridiculous. I mean, sure, it was kind of to be expected, both my friend had graduated last year and I'm hopefully on my way out in May and we were on our way to Wal-Mart, which we all understand is something that is kind of evil. But in retrospect, it just seems silly. I was more awkward than I currently am once and not giving him the benefit of the doubt is disappointing to me personally. I didn't want that to happen to me when I was young and a freshman and now I'm keeping the process going? Bad James.

Having lived in the group for a good six or seven semesters of my tenure here, I'm no longer enthusiastic. I'm beaten down and have stories of trying to get a social group to move on something that's based on apathy and a healthy distance from more productive members of campus.

But him? He sees possibilities I dare not contemplate because I believe I know what is possible and what is out of the question. (ASG will not refund our money in a remotely timely fashion. I accept this.)

Oh, I've been there. I wanted to organize something. I was a part of another initiative that went for a couple months and then petered out. I can tell him that it won't work and to stop being so unbearably positive.

I can tell him this, but the truth is that the future of the group is for the juniors, sophomores and freshmen to mold as they see fit. I'm not needed—I've done my part. Now, I ought to enjoy the fruits of my labor, which (so far as I can tell) is being a thorn in the side of everyone trying to eat lunch in the Campus Center. But there's something else.

There's a larger and more inclusive community in the group than when I joined and that is the real reward. That's what I want out of college. I want a circle of friends. I want to grow. I want to leave in an almost mechanical cavalcade of good wishes and wistful memories. I want a diploma that says I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.

Soon, all that will be mine.

I've seen this club grow, and now isn't the time for me to be cynical or pessimistic. It's winter. Those emotions just get me in trouble and I'd like to spare the kids that set of experiences. The future, if I can use Joe Strummer's language, is unwritten. It will be their hands on the pen.

As part of a larger group of others, I have kept the pen safe and scribbled as best as I can on my future. This pen was handed down to me by other members, regardless of whether I agreed with what they wrote with it.

To those underclassmen I say, “Here take this pen. Write on the page of Allegheny, whether it's in the margins or over the letterhead. Oh...And write opinion columns. Please?"

Demos: The Impending Glory of American Adulthood

The title is another Crime In Stereo song, off of their now-venerated 2006 record, the Troubled Stateside. Buy it now. The song is track three. Both the song and this piece are about the same emotion: Shit, I'm growing up.

These columns are starting to turn into letters to the community. I don't know whether it's just my pronounced anti-social tendencies (Seasonal Affect Disorder, how are you?) or that I’m getting better at writing.
Grant me your attention, if for a moment. I do feel as if I'm clinging to my sanity or good humor.
The current generation of games does not interest me. This isn't for reasons of quality, since 2008 was one of the best years for games in recent memory. I simply can't afford the new games and systems. I'm feeling more and more distant from the current gaming generation and the reasons, aside from revenue, aren't really fashionable. I'm getting older and have other equally expensive interests to cultivate as well as a limited amount of time to indulge them all.

Investing in new systems is maddening. The Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure and has a tiered pricing structure, which means if I don't want to play inventory management on my console, I have to buy an external hard drive (or pay extra). Plus, its new games cost $60. The Wii has yet to find a library of third party games that take advantage of the Wii remote and are actually worth playing. The PS3 (and the games on it) is still too expensive for my tastes and does not retain the PS2 backwards compatibility, which is where most of my games are.
I've yet to exhaust that library. Sitting by my television is a stack of about five or six stellar PS2 games (a later Burnout and Splinter Cell iteration and God Of War 2, among others) released in the last four years, each of which needs finishing or starting. I'm also tempted by the promise of the Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections for a whopping $30 total.

Like books, movies, TV shows and other media, there’s always something new and shiny. But there are three or four less shiny things that get left along the way. The trick, if videogames are to be a hobby that does not cripple you financially, is to stay a couple years behind the cutting edge.

There are advantages to this for PC gaming—hopefully the bugs in the original games will have been fixed. The expansions on content will also usually come to you for free since the game is no longer current. It also means that on the console side the good games will have been removed from the chaff and will cost you half as much. It's because of these older games that I'm okay with becoming increasingly irrelevant in current videogame discourse. For reasons that make a sad logic to me, I am not much of a "gamer".

Gaming is an expensive hobby to stay up-to-date with. In some circles, it's only when I'm willing to pay a $350+ ante to play a $60 game that I am marked as a gamer. The disposable income exists to do that and buy one game, presuming I don't want to eat or enjoy anything else until the semester is over.
I'm keenly aware that I will not have as much time as I currently do later on, so five or six games will last me at least eighteen months. By then, the price will have gone down for the next generation systems and I'll have bought the aforementioned Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections.

As I get older, I'm beginning to wonder if the real question of videogames is not what you pick up and what you stay current with, but instead what you leave behind along the way. I view the trailing edge as the way to play videogames like one might pick flowers--slowly and with gusto. This only makes the scent sweeter in a world that moves quickly and without pity. Whether it's a chrysanthemum or a controller, I hope you'll pick one up.