The thought came to me the other day that sometimes D&D reflects real life. Ok, there are fire breathing dragons and acid swords and +2 helms of holiness, but there are challenges and rewards and "leveling up" as you would call it, and there are specialties, single class characters and characters with multi-classes.
In D&D multi-classing is a long and grinding road of constant hazards, sometimes unbelievably painfully slow as you watch your character become better in both classes. Alongside that is, at young ages that character is not very good at anything really, they're neither this nor that. A wizard/rogue is not a very good spell-caster and not good at picking locks. It takes almost twice the amount of Dire Rat kills to get anywhere as a multi-class.
Such is the same with life, or at least with my life. In the last while I've come to the realization that I am a multi-class. Here I am posing as a IT guy in daytime life, and then at night I work on my real love: music. Neither abilities are advancing at a quick rate and when I was younger I was really kind of bad at both. If I focused on my computer skills my music suffered, and if I focused more on music my computer skills fell behind. These days if I focus too much on my music my boss gets grumpy and starts to think I'm not 100% committed to being there. Which of course is not entirely untrue.. at least not in the greater scheme of things.
I think that real-life musicians, ones with kids, a house, a mortgage, no rich benefactor or inheritance, and ones who aren't famous because of accident/endless whoring of themselves are multi classed characters. We HAVE to be. You can't give music up entirely, especially if you're an obsessive like me, it will eat away at the back of your brain until you are a cranky bitch who will snap on a pin drop. You also can't give up your job, because let's face it: you're not more talented than ever other {pick an instrument}alist out there, you don't have the funds and you will not be discovered in a grand flourish of lights and applause. You are a western society musician, materialistic as the rest, you won't live alone in a one bedroom apartment downtown amongst the sirens and you want some semblance of security.
In a multi classed character there is a point when all the crazy hours you've grinded away at this character pays off (or doesn't pay off) and you become really cool (or really useless). I wonder if soon that point will come around, when I find out if I've fractured my too much, spread too thin, or that everything I was duplicitous about was worth it and will work off each other to make this character really cool.
Ok I've had some wine... and I'm getting pensive, and I realize I've played way too much D&D in my life, but you know it's something to ponder...
Obviously none of my family members are reading this blog, or my Wish List would be completely purchased.
I guess that's partly good and bad...
I am totally confused and apathetic about what to post about these days, there are so many things I feel strongly about, and so little time to talk about them.
My family is not getting enough sleep these days, ruled by the iron fist of the Tyrant and his name starts with a G. Every night about an hour after he's put to bed he wakes up. You just get to sleep and bam! "Whaaaa"... and there is NO possible way he will go back to sleep by himself. Last night we tried leaving him... yeah, that ended up with baby vomit on his sheets and a change of clothing. This morning I tried getting him back to sleep and gave up quickly, he just wants to go into our bed and sleep with Mommy. Yes it makes me crabby, if you can't read between the lines.
Last night I was so tired and out of it that I went to take my inhaler and instead I grabbed my stick deodorant and almost took a bite out of it. And earlier that same day I was caught nodding off at my desk.... things have got to change.
Xavier went on his first field trip yesterday, he was just thrilled. He couldn't stop talking about it when I got home "We went on a school bus and we rode a tractor and we got to feed animals and..." . In fact this morning when he woke up he said "Are we going on another field trip today?" I'm really happy he is enjoying preschool, it's defintely good to hear he has friends there and that he can't wait to go. His eyes just light up when you say "You have school tomorrow!". I remember a time when mine did the same.
When I spoke of good things in the past post I was referring to the # of gigs I've had lately and other opportunities to play/record. We're also getting a 4×4 Honda quad from my father-in-law, which of course we can't use in the city but we could likely sell for a few thousand, it would help pay for my wife's teeth and some other stuff.
Why is it whenever there are good things happening I can't entirely enjoy them because there is always that feeling of impending doom?
"Waiting for the other shoe to drop" I think would be the phrase. My definition is "For every good thing that happens there is at least one bad thing on it's way."
It always leaves me on edge and uneasy, I wonder if is some sort of a syndrome for this or something.
Maybe it's just me.
I'm Oorgo, or Dave as I'm sometimes called, and I live in Northern Alberta, Canada. I work in tech support for a small medical automation software company, while attempting to gig on the side playing trumpet, whenever possible (usually Latin bands these days).
I grew up in a small town, moved to a small city when I was 19, went to college studying Music, mostly Jazz trumpet. I went to University at St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish Nova Scotia for a couple years (they gave me transfer credit to finish off a degree) in their Music program, B. Mus Jazz performance.
I met my wife when we were in college, we started seeing each other when I was 21, a couple years after university we bought a house and then got married in 1997. 2 days before our wedding one of our best friends, and the best man for our wedding, died of a heart attack. He was inflicted with a genetic disorder called Ehlers Danlos syndrome, where the tissue in his body was weakened and could rupture under pressure. He was told he was a ticking time bomb when he was diagnosed, and that most adults don't live past 21 with the condition. He beat the odds for 5 years (I believe), and we gave our son his name as a middle name.
In early 1997 we both were laid off, her in January, me in February. I was unemployed for approximately a year, at that time I went back to school for Help Desk, and got a tech support job back in the internet boom days.
I'm now 37, we have a little 3 (almost 4) year old boy who is amazing and a miracle. He was born 7 weeks early with bi-lateral brain bleeds, seizures, and had to be intibated to breath from the start. The doctors said he may never walk properly, he may have cerebral palsy, he may be mentally handicapped, and the list went on. He is NONE of the above, he walks fine, is incredibly bright and has proved them wrong and astonished everyone at ever turn in the road. He's now talking up a storm and in regular pre-school.
Xavier is our 3rd child, we have had difficulty bringing a child to term, our first child was a missed miscarriage, and the second, Tristan, was 37 weeks fully grown but his heart stopped. No doctor to this day can give us a definite reason why it happened, we will probably never know. They believe it was "compression of the cord", but no deformaties, no clots, no umbilicle cord problems that you could see. I still get angry when I think about it, I'm sure it will take a long time still, before we entirely recover.
Update:
Ok so I am apparently a terrible father and all that stuff, because I didn't update this to include Griffin who was born at the end of 2005. He was born via cesarian at 27 weeks and is now a 10 months old handful. Growing like a weed, teething, scrapping with his older brother, laughing and laughing and screaming and slapping. He's about 25 lbs and it's mostly all muscle, he has red hair like me and curly hair like his mom when she was little. Most people that meet him think he's going to be a football/hockey player he's so stocky.
SO that's my story.
The name Oorgo came from a D&D character I created back in ... I think it was 1990 or 91, on an online multiplayer text adventure game. A semi-random movement of the keys, and I dug it so that became my nickname. At one time I was also known as Rufus the Red, back in Malum and Viewline days. If you are reading this and you know me from that time, don't hate me I was a punk-ass kid.
It's odd, recently I started thinking about high school, as my 20 year reunion is coming up next year, so I got in contact with a friend of mine I've known since kindergarten (or before) by email. He's doing great, he is part owner (I think) and pharmacist for one of the drug stores in my home town, he keeps in contact with alot of the people we went to school with. We talked about old times a bit and I realized that once had I left my hometown and attended college/university I basically blocked out memory of it, high school especially, and any time preceding high school. I blocked out the good along with the bad.
The problem with that plan was I also blocked out parts of who I was. I hated 85% of high school: the crap they put you through, the cliques, the small mindedness of the people there, country music, fickle and mean people. I had a couple shit jobs there after highschool too, so I wasn't exactly prone to having good memories, of course part of the reason they were shit jobs was because I drank and partied too much but that was part of the crowd I was with. We drank to escape and to relieve the boredom; hardcore binge drinking. You can probably see my reasons for leaving it all behind.
I remember now that there were good times in amongst the shit. I remember the new friends that I did have after my junior high group of friends ejected me from the group in grade 10 and tortured me until I left them alone and more after that. I remember ... damn... I still have a hard time getting past that 20 years later, stupid memory.
It's funny how memory works, how the bad things can be so vivid and fresh, yet the good things are grey and washed out. Of the good things I remember my family the most, and my neighbors and the people in my church. I realized when I got older that my parents, especially compared to most, are wonderful, they may have been strict sometimes, but I was raised right. My neighbour Mrs Parkinson was my stand-in grandma, she was a great lady and I miss her still, and my neighbour friends The Leroux family, they were rough around the edges but great people nonetheless. Even though I later on didn't agree with all the teachings of the church, the people who attended were kind and genuinely good people
I think recalling these times has been good for me, I feel almost like there are some spaces filling in, some of my identity recovered. I've heard it said that you don't know who you are if you don't know where you're from, I wonder if that applies to blocking out where you're from.