The importance of choosing appropriate RPG stats

Second last but not second least!

Aging is an interesting beast. It took me awhile to disconnect my feelings with that of society's, but I  have recently realized that I quite enjoy growing older. Obviously, there are lame things like my body falling apart after exertion that was previously fine (What bro? You want to party two nights in a row? Who does that?), but all in all, I've decided that growing older is great.

One thing that I enjoy is being able to better understand people. I find that as I grow older and talk and listen to more people, I'm better able to read people and understand what they're feeling and thinking. Looking back at myself when I was 5 or 10 years younger, I feel like my understanding of people, emotions, and thoughts were so naive. I'm really excited to extend this thinking for the future -- by the time I'm 50, will my ability to read people have increased in a similar rate as the past five years? Or, will society and people have changed so much so that my reading skills are outdated? Does this skill require considerable upkeep? Judging from how my people skills drop off after working at home without talking to another soul over a blizzardy few days, the answer is yes!

Similarly, I enjoy looking at my experiences over the last five years. I've lived in 5 cities in 3 countries, had a bunch of amazing experiences, and my fair share of negative and traumatic ones too. I feel like through experiencing these events that I'm much able to connect and feel empathy to a wider range of people and experiences. I really enjoy feeling connected to people and I'm excited to experience more things as I grow older that will help make more connections with more people.

I was relating something similar to this blog post to my friend Henry and he responded with "Scott, of course you like growing older. If life was an RPG, you would put all your stats in Wisdom and Charisma [, the skills that you have increased by growing older]." Henry knows me quite well and was indeed correct, as whenever I play an RPG, that is exactly what I do!  Perhaps my enjoyment with aging comes from identifying what attributes of life I enjoy and nourishing those attributes. I don't think I explicitly identified these attributes, I feel like I intuited them and perhaps got lucky. I have really enjoyed my progress over the past five years, and perhaps this enjoyment has made me optimistic about aging!

What makes a grown-up?

I kind of can't believe that I didn't think of this earlier in relation to this month's topic, but I follow a pretty cool blog called Adulting that's basically about becoming a together type of person. It's not so much about aging as it is about growing up, but I really like it and maybe you'd like to check it out!

Anyway, yesterday's post there made me think about a comment I wanted to make on Dave's post on "Thinking about Batman" except that I couldn't figure out how to phrase it.

The gist of it is basically this: that it's not eating balanced meals every night and going to the symphony instead of bar shows that makes you an adult, it's being a good, respectful, reliable person.

With grey hair.

Twitter on Aging

I just saw this in my twitter feed, and thought it seemed relevant to the blog's topic for this month :)

(though I should point out that I never really had a crush on Xander, as I was more of an Oz girl).

God willing and the creek don't rise

Full disclosure: I have grey hair!

Or rather I should say that I've started getting grey hair, and "started" should be read as "found the first one at least four years ago," although that makes no sense grammatically. Given that I'm 25 right now, you can do the math on this one yourselves. But seriously, what the hell? Luckily it's still (I think) not noticeable in the rest of my hair, but every time I see it again I have a quiet conniption* about what I'm going to do when it is noticeable, since I really dislike the thought of dying my hair to cover up the grey as a vanity thing, but I also really dislike the idea of being a greying twenty-something, because I already have enough trouble getting dates as it is.

That's not really what I want to talk about, though.

I've had an overly healthy sense of my own mortality pretty much ever since I can remember. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I'll throw out a few wild guesses about it having something to do with how the food I eat can kill me** and Rescue 911 being my favourite show when I was 5 years old.

But while I'm always busy contemplating how I'm going to die suddenly and horribly, I'm opposed to maxims about living every day like it's your last. I can tell you right now that if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I wouldn't be at work, I'd be busy having an orgy while under the influence of as many hard drugs as possible. And maybe I'd have dinner or something with my family. Not exactly a lifestyle that can be maintained over the course of a potentially long life.

I'm not about to tell anyone else how to live, but for me personally I think this means that the most responsible approach is a balance between seizing the day and playing the long game, which is to say that it's important to me to be happy right now but also recognize that, if average life expectancy is 80 years, I still have over two times as many years as I've already lived ahead of me i.e. a pretty incomprehensibly huge amount of time. So, one day, I'll actually be old, not this current old where I'm getting grey hair and my metabolism is slowing down a little bit. It's really important to me to keep that in mind when I'm thinking about my quality of life, and what I want the big picture of my life to look like.

And as nervous as I am to lose my (relative, at this point) youth, I'm really excited to still have all that experience ahead of me. I realize that this is a bit of a cliche, but life's surprises are pretty much my favourite thing. I'm not going to be a jackass and say that I love the bad surprises, too, because that's not true. What I mean is that I think the unexpectedness of it all makes it less daunting to think that I might live another, Jesus Christ, fifty or sixty years. Those years aren't all going to be the same. I mean, I'm not exactly adventurous and I can safely make certain assumptions about things like my job and and where I'll be living a year from now, but people can pop up in your life unexpectedly and mess up everything, or relationships with people you've known for a long time can change, and then things end up differently than what you expected.

It's not just about people, either, it's about things like self-knowledge and learning, too. The passing of time means learning new things and refining my perspective on the world. I'm the one constant in my life, the only person I have to put up with no matter what, so it really helps to know that so far the older I get, the better I become as person (if I say so myself *collar tug*).

What I'm clumsily trying to get at is that aging is the trade-off for experience, and if we're lucky we all have a lot more life ahead of us than we're really able to conceptualize after only a quarter century, most of which was spent on the progression from baby to child to angsty teen. I feel like there's a sense of hurry in one's 20s, because life after 30 doesn't look as bright and shiny. Really though, there's all this time***, and I sometimes wish people would calm down and realize that. Our society values youth because it's so sparkly, and the intensity of experience seems to fade as you get older e.g. how things that are awesome!!! or terrible :( :( :( when you're a teenager become completely trivial in hindsight. I think this can be as insidious as a lot of the gender role messaging that people get.

In conclusion, life is short and long, and don't be in such a hurry to cram everything into your young, beautiful years, because you have lots more to go and you'll need to occupy them somehow.


* My use of the word "conniption" may also suggest that I have bigger fish to fry when it comes to how old I appear.
** I have anaphylaxis to peanuts and tree nuts.
*** "for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse"? Yep, I am that terrible.

Thinking about Batman

I was going through my folder of funny pictures I find on the internet, and came across a comic from XKCD that pretty much sums up my thoughts on aging.

I often feel this way.  I spend much of my days doing "grown-up" activities, but my mind is often somewhere else completely.  I spend lots of time thinking about my hobbies.  I have numerous hobbies, some which are far nerdier than others, but most of them make me feel like a big kid.  Being an engineer at the same time makes me feel a little like I have split-personalities.  One is the serious engineer, working in the serious workplace, where everything is serious.  The other is the kid with his head in the clouds trying to figure out how to build the biggest thing ever built... even if that thing exists only in minecraft.

There might have been a grander point to this post but I lost it... I was thinking about Batman.

This Too Shall Pass

Perception of age is a strange beast. When I was 6, I remember pledging to my mother that I wouldn’t need birthday parties once I turned 10, because then I’d be “too old” for them. Of course, once my 10^th birthday rolled around, I adamantly pushed for having a birthday party, despite my younger self’s notions of maturity. At 6, though, I was absolutely convinced that 10 was an important, even momentous age, at which I’d blossom into a slightly smaller version of an adult, probably writing novels and sipping lemonade in my spare time. Birthday parties? Childish! “Leave me to my craft,” I’d say, hunched over a notebook while rocking back and forth in a chair on the porch.

A Portrait of the Blogger as an Idiot Child

Similarly, when I think back to where I thought I’d be at 25 – once I could conceptualize numbers that high –I was also pretty confident that I’d have achieved Great Things (TM). This isn’t to say that I haven’t accomplished anything; I have, but it occurs to me now that I’ve spent the bulk of my life thinking of age in terms of achievements naturally unlocked by the passing of time. Just like a health regeneration rate in a video game, age (or how I thought of it) was a passive counter ticking up and up and up. Rather than life being, well, work, it seemed to be a half-effortless progression into jobs, marriages, children, and whatnot. Part of the struggle in my aging has been to undo this weird idea I’ve had and to build a new, more realistic model of age for myself.

Whether it’s good or bad, I now think of age most often in terms of comparison to fictional characters. Buffy was 22 when the series ended, so I had to shift to the world of Spaced for my (lackadaisical) mid-twenties inspiration. I may be coming up on a gap – needing a new show or book to parallel – with the latter half of my twenties. The comforting thing about this model is that fictional characters are just as clueless as we are, but we can observe them from a space where we know that their problems are going to work out all right (though Joss Whedon kills off a few too many people for his works to be deeply reassuring). As silly as it might seem, I’m soothed by looking at fictional characters because I know that there are so many different ways that they live, achieve, grow, and change. It’s a little like breaking out of the linear “level up or else” way I’d thought of age before.

Penny: Role Model for the Ages

Aging, especially for women, is often something we talk about with dread. (I would really like it if there were an equivalent female term for ‘silver foxes’ – ‘silver vixens?’). Wrinkles, disease, persistent spinster or bachelorhood, ‘dead-end’ jobs, and emotional crises come hand in hand with the ever-encroaching territory of continued existence, at least by typical standards. But whenever you can find a person who’s your age, and handling life in an admirable way, even if they’re fictional, it’s a relief –reassurance that the cultural ideas we have about aging aren’t an inescapable prison.

Of course, the joke about adulthood really does seem to be that you never feel like an adult, at least not fully. It’s all some weird trick of the light where you look at a picture of yourself from ten years ago and think “wow, I thought I knew what I was doing then, but I sure as hell didn’t!” and the same thing will happen in another ten years with a different photo. Constantly shifting self-awareness (or lack thereof!) as a dominant emotional state – it’s kind of terrifying, and kind of calming. It’s a reminder that, in the words of that old saying, “this too shall pass.” Since that applies to the good and the bad, it helps to quell anxieties and to temper euphoria. And I’ll keep on celebrating my birthday until I damn well please. 

Like So.

July Topic!

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

The June poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: professional sports, writing
• 1 vote: high school graduation, reunions, travel
• 2 votes: siblings
• 3 votes: aging

That means the topic for this month is aging. Somewhat depressing, maybe, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.


Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the August topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month. If a topic gets no votes for three consecutive months, it gets moved off of the poll to make room for other potential topics. Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll.