I keep meaning to write in here but there doesn’t seem to be much to blog about. That’s not true, there’s plenty going on, but it’s all positive and productive and like a goofball, I tend to write only about things that make me cranky and that I need to let out. Like other people, I tend to retain the bad stuff much more acutely than the good stuff. Weird, that, but eh. I shall now babble at you about what’s happened since I last wrote.

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I was prompted by a friend who asked what a gaming session looked like. I thought I’d write it out, if only to look upon it with nostalgia later. ;)

Before I go into what a session looks like, there are a few factors to consider. One, not every gaming session will look like what I describe. There are many different editions to the “base” Dungeons & Dragons game, v1, v2, v3, v3.5, v4, and a few others that I am not familiar with. In addition, there are supplimental books to any and all of the gaming editions, modules that tweak the game a certain way, introduces new classes, other races, more skills, spells, monsters, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up a Dungeons & Dragons game.

Two, depending on the GM (GameMaster), you may or may not play with a game board, miniature figures, custom content that the GM has taken the time to write up and use. The GM I game with currently uses dice and the printed books of v3, with a custom world map and her own restrictions on races depending on which continent/area she decides your character is to originate in. Each of us has their own set of dice, and we use a character sheet containing every bit of information about our character: name, age, physical description, history, what they’re wearing, using, carrying, and six stats upon which all skills and abilities are based upon, strength, constitution, intelligence, and a couple others.

Three, game sessions can occur daily, weekly, bi-monthly, or at irregular intervals, depending on the group’s needs. For two people with schedules that change weekly, our group tries to meet weekly, coordinating schedules as soon as each gets their schedule for the next week.

Four, there can be as few as two people (one GM and one player, though obviously that doesn’t bode well for social interaction), and as many as the GM can handle. Our group has six, not counting the GM. Imagine us all crowded around a folding card table with our character sheets, dice, drinks, snacks, and everything else cluttering it, talking and joking loudly, vacating chairs and tripping over others trying to get outside for smoke breaks, bathroom breaks, and so on. It’s a bit mad but fun.

Okay, enough babbling. Now, there are two parts to any new, freshly started gaming campaign–the session where you create your character, and the rest of the sessions where you drag your character through whatever the GM’s whim takes him/her/them. I greatly enjoyed the two times I made a new character. GM mileage may vary, but mine allowed all of us to choose whatever race and class we wanted. That was the first thing I chose.

The next step involved rolling our stats. Our GM allowed us two different ways of rolling: using 4d6 (4 six-sided dice) and discarding the lowest die, adding the three remaining dice together and choosing which stat we wanted to put the single or double digit number, repeating this six times; or using 5d6, discarding the lowest two dice, adding the three remaining dice together, and requiring us to place each single or double digit number in each sequential stat, which might mean that you’d have to choose your class after seeing where the highest stats landed. The 4d6 method would allow you to put the best/highest number in the stat(s) your chosen class needs most, the 5d6 method ensured higher stats across the board but limited your class choice. I chose the 4d6 method, as I really wanted to play a certain class.

Once that was done, we were instructed to choose a race (human, elf, dwarf, etc), a class (ranger, fighter, druid, etc), and give our character its physical features. Our GM told each of us that our character originated in an area that she arbitrarily chose, and then gave us a list of applicable races to choose from. We were allowed our own class choice. There are resources online that describe basic and exotic race and class choices. Our GM also allowed us to choose to play a “gestalt” character, a character of any race who has TWO classes, such as a sorcerer/druid or whathaveyou. The caveat to that was that your character would hold all the benefits AND penalties of each class. Fighters might have a penalty to INT, for example.

With all the really basic stuff done, we’d move onto skills. The GM would tell us how many skill points we had, based on our stats and a dice roll for a random total. From there, we’d choose the few skills in a long list of possible skills we could have, and how many skill points we’d have in that particular skill.

And then, it was time to go shopping! ^^ We had to choose armor, weapons, and crap we’d want to lug around with us. We were given a budget and a total weight burden and told to go to town.

Since there were five of us at the time all creating our characters, this took an entire five hour session to complete. The following week, we had our first gaming session, wherein we had separate adventures, the GM leading us from the recent past, to the “present”, where we happened to conveniently gather in the same town, and the same inn, wherein we began interacting and roleplaying with each other. I’d chosen a boring, generic character and by the end of this session, just wasn’t feeling her. The GM made a special trip the following week to get me set up with a second character, along with someone else we’d invited to game with us.

Tomorrow night, I get to play my second character, for the first time. I’ve spent the time between its creation and tomorrow night reading up on the exotic race I chose and got the GM’s permission to play, and all about the class I chose, the ranger. I’ve found a few photos that exemplify what my character looks like in her human form, her cat form, and her hybrid cat-woman (lol) form. I’m excited. It promises to be a fun time. I’m modeling my character after the character Neytiri from the movie Avatar as far as being a hunter, but a little more aloof, very helpful as a chaotic good archer but very self-motivated and independent. She’s not a girly girl by any means, though she would clean up nice if she ever bothered. She’ll be in her human form and go off by herself to hunt, change, and hide her not-humanness from the others in her party until necessary to reveal, or caught off-guard.

This’ll be fun. :)

So, after the grand total of one evening of roleplay and other D&D nerdity, I decided I just wasn’t feeling my young, naive druid cleric, and started researching other races to mess with. I really had an obnoxious impulse to play a ranger (archer), with whom I could roleplay more readily than my nice but boring little cleric. I decided upon a half-elf, simply because I thought it’d be fun to play a character who fit in with neither fictional human nor elven societies, a misfit with a talent for hunting with bow and arrow.

The DM told me that elves were not available in the area I was starting in, and so it was unlikely there’d be any half-elf hybrids in the area. Well, okay. She gave me a list of races I could choose from, and my ears were tweaked when she mentioned the hengeyokai. “Shapeshifters,” she explained, continuing her long list.

I interrupted her. “Can you tell me more about the.. shapeshifters?”

She shifted through her books and found the section on them. The D&D equivalent derives from Japanese legends regarding supernatural beings of all sorts and shapes. The hengeyokai were a type of being who could morph from human to animal, and chose more often than not to carry on life as an animal, a very intelligent animal. In D&D, they have three forms: human, some sort of common animal, and a wierd hybrid of the two that is described as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle type.

I was so intrigued by the section I was given to read, that I decided right then and there I’d be that race. I could choose the animal my character would morph into, and out of the list of mostly undesirables such as rats, alligators, and wolves, I chose the cat, and then asked the DM to clarify whether we were talking a big cat or a little cat. “Housecat,” I was told. Well then.

So, my new character, and the one I’m keeping no matter how the game goes (assuming the DM lets my character live for very long), is a female hengeyokai ranger who can shapeshift from a completely believable human, to a fluffy white Persian, the hybrid looking rather like Toodles Galore. The human sports very white, pink skin, and shockingly white hair, the cat will be your garden variety long-haired, smooshed-face Persian, and the hybrid will be covered in fine white fur.

Her name is Delia, as that was the name I’d decided on my hypothetical half-elf ranger. The name originates from the Greek island of Delos, the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo, among others. Artemis is a Greek goddess of the hunt, the forest, fertility, and mildly, abstinence, and is often depicted with a bow and arrow. The name still fits. The animal has no fighting skill, but the hybrid will be able to use a cat’s senses, and still be able to communicate with both other cats and other humans. It will make her an even more effective hunter and tracker.

I decided to play a chaotic good character this time, a female model of Robin Hood. It should be rather fun. The DM gave her a random, epic-level item as well to start out with, an armor with +4 defense, along with other niceties that then banned me from getting another uber item–everyone else, save the barbarian elf, was given two uber items, the elf getting a similar epic armor thingie.

I’m looking forward to the first time I can play her. Last week was a no-go with everyone’s schedules running amok. This week isn’t looking much better, but we’ll probably try to put something together. The druid might not be able to play every session with us with his wonky schedule, but ah well.

I don’t write about my thoughts and opinions on religion very often.

Mostly because I cannot stand stupid shit silly concepts like this:

A mandate on how you hug because somehow your fully clothed and not-in-use genitalia is facing someone else’s and that somehow constitutes a lustful and sexual overtone? Really? Makes you reconsider that full frontal you give your parents.

Answer me this, how do you wrap your arm around someone with that awkward side hug? Do you, the hugger, drape your arm along the huggee’s shoulder, wherein your hand is dangerously close to someone’s chest area? Do you wrap it casually around someone else’s waist, denoting dominance over that person’s hip region?

Why allow physical contact at all? Even air kisses are wrought with sex. Even words can bring on lustful thoughts, so why allow speaking or hearing? Batting your eyelashes at someone can be construed as flirtatious and therefore sinful, so I suppose looking at someone is out too. I say that even thoughts should be carefully controlled, by not allowing someone to think at all, lest they lust where the thought police cannot reach. Don’t even get me started on smell and taste. You ever hear of food being orgasmically good?

Sorry, my snark is showing. I’m not one to criticize a religion, least of all the one I grew up in, but what is with this poo? Am I really to understand that all the times I hugged the elderly congregation during the “greeting” portion of the service throughout my childhood, I was really advertising unwittingly that what I was doing had anything to do with sex? Really?

It’s a frikkin’ hug. Even Jesus is said to have done it on occasion. Huh huh, done it…

Vandalism aside, and yes yes it costs money to clean the filters and change the broken parts because of it, I always snickered, on the bus ride to college every day, when I saw that someone had poured dish soap or laundry detergent into the fountain next to the bank.

It was always a surprise, and I always looked for it. Sometimes the bubbles were only just noticable as froth foaming on the surface of the agitated water. Sometimes the bubbles were so numerous that they spilled over the sides of the fountains, onto the pavement, into the street.

One early morning, the busload of people were amused by the sight of bubbles having streamed entirely down the street, for about four city blocks. There was so many large bubbles that the lower half of the fountain was obscured in the stuff.

A friend, hereafter named Red-Headed GM, offered to start up a D&D game with myself, the druid and the two other roommates the gamer and the geek, and a mutual friend who arrived with the GM. So last week, we spent the evening doing character creation. We got cola and a whole bunch of chocolate and salty munchies, we each had our own set of die, and after five hours of light-hearted giggling and goofing around, we filled out our character sheets.

I had picked the gamer’s brain regarding various D&D things, I’ve played a few MMOs and knew the right questions to ask regarding different classes, my gaming style and how I can adapt that to a D&D game, different races, and so on. I chose to play a human cleric of 15 years of age, a little Asian kid who is not worldly nor very imaginative, who is aligned Lawful Good, as I have found myself to glean that result no matter how many times I take the D&D alignment quizzes available online. The lot of us were to start out at level 3, with the exception of the geek who started at lvl 2 due to her choice of race and pecularities of the diety her cleric chose.

The DM has some areas, races, dieties, and other components that are original to “her” world. Based on the races we chose, she decided our originating area. The DM’s friend asked for and was granted the requested race of Kender. As my character’s race was human, and the DM had chosen that humans and kender live relatively close in region, the kender and I would hail from the same region. My cleric could learn one language besides the Common. I chose that of the Kender, which amused her no end. The druid chose a druid, of course, of a monkey race I do not recall just now. The gamer chose a barbarian elf, and the geek chose a cleric of a race I do not recall.

Anyway, we chose all that stuff and got stats and stuff the previous week. My beginning stats were (at lvl 3): STR 10 (+0), DEX 9 (-1), CON 15 (+2), INT 13 (+1), WIS 18 (+4), and CHA 15 (+2). I was given 2800 gold to distribute however I chose, in choice of armor (heavy), goods (hooks, rope, rations) and other niceties (cart & pony). I actually have enough gold left for a bag of holding. Mwaha.

Tonight’s first session was chaotic, with the GM talking with each player individually, guiding everyone through seven simulated weeks of encounters and other such things, eventually steering us to the same city, where she encouraged us to meet in the same tavern. While she was gaming with us individually, the other players were wandering around, smoking, making caustic and silly comments about the session in progress, talking about off-topic things and trying to draw the players-in-progress into conversation. It was confusing and I couldn’t hear a lot of what my character was supposed to be doing. As I’d never gamed before in a tabletop game like this, I’m not sure I have all the information I was supposed to get, but ah well, I’ll learn as I go, playing my character as naïvely as I am.

The kender character and my cleric teenager of doom journeyed together for a time, me on a mission to deliver a package, and the kender trying and at one point succeeding in viewing the package.

The five of us were guided through “recent past” events, ending up in a present situation in which all five of us happened upon a tavern in the middle of an average, large human town. The barbarian elf was wondering what a child was doing with a mug of beer, while the kender was overly amused by the barbarian’s facial tattoos. The simian druid was trying to get the barmaid to make mead with the four pounds of honey he’d found on his journeys, the slutty cleric was eating daintily in her finery watching the barbarian’s companion gnome babble about stories, and I was quietly perched upon the bar (as it was higher than the bar stool and the entire tavern was captivated by the gnome’s storytelling), quietly watching and watching bemusedly as the kender situated herself upon the barbarian’s lap to see better, quietly braiding his hair while he was watching the gnome, not aware of the kender’s actions. Oh yeah, the kender decorated my simple cart with chalk drawings.

That was as far as we got, but whee, what a ride.

I haven’t been very writey lately. My days are fairly full–from the time I wake up until around 2pm, I’m calling and writing people asking if I may purchase their car or truck by making payments. Nobody’s taken me up on it yet.

From 2pm to around 7pm, I’m calling and writing people asking if I may apply for a job they’ve offered. It usually ends up being a scam, require me to pay something, or say the position’s already been filled.

From 7pm to midnight, I’m doing stuff around the house, cooking, cleaning, perhaps a nap or flinging the cat around.

After midnight, I dink around on Facebook, hug the druid, or crash the heck out.

And I do it all over again the following day.

My family needs a car so desperately and there are two people with full-time jobs, and another two who are applying everywhere to also be employed. With a car, I could find a job much faster, as there are jobs at the airport, delivery positions, and other such things I can’t do without my own transportation, as either the job requires it, or the busses don’t run in the middle of the night when I require them. I’d like rather strongly to get a job in realty, in product delivery, as a leasing agent, as a bank teller, or an employee in a small mom&pop store I particularly like. They all require transportation.

I’ve emailed or contacted over 417 people over the past month, asking if I may purchase their car with payments over time. I keep records of all of this. I have emailed or contacted over 286 people who have advertised openings and job opportunities in their organizations. I keep records of all that, too.

It’s not for lack of trying that I have neither a car nor a job. It gets very disheartening that I need one to have the other, and both are being denied to me. I spend a lot of time crying these days. I want to be a productive member of society and I want to ensure that the druid’s employment is secure. Life seems determined to keep me from that. I face each day with the naïve hope that someone might give me a chance, give me a try, give me a hand. Each night I have only sore fingers, a sore voice, and a phone with no charge.

I’m not sure what else I can do, at this point. I’ve started volunteering at an animal shelter, the hospital, and I just signed up to volunteer at a suicide crisis center. I’ll begin paperwork to volunteer at a computer repair place next Monday.

I understand that times are hard, but do they have to be this hard?

I thought about this entry, and its title, while I was using the restroom this morning. The druid had just gone to work with the driver, a friend who has driven taxis for a number of years, and provides his service to the druid for a reduced fee. There was a wet, used towel on the floor next to the tub.

The driver visited very early this morning, made use of our shower, and broke his fast with scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee, before driving the druid to work. The driver, who had been living with his parents while he went to school, had been abruptly thrown out, and now lives in his car. The druid didn’t tell me until just last night what’s been going on in this gentleman’s life.

Of course I was happy to allow him use of the shower. Even if he didn’t go to church as he tends to do, I know how important it is to feel clean, even if for a short time. And the food, well, we have more of that, and have enough to share. A bit later in the morning I even volunteered to help him with his phone, as it’s a cheap plan and it’s probably one of the only ways he can get enough money, through taxi-ing and such, to keep his car running, keep himself fed, and so on.

To me, it’s just a dirty towel on the floor, another dirty plate in the sink. To the driver, it’s a small token of dignity, a simple moment to not worry about the next meal, the next time he can bathe, and so on. Without the driver, we would be in true danger of being unable to take care of ourselves, as the druid depends heavily upon this man to get him from work in the middle of the night.

Heck, I wish we had yet another empty room or a corner to stash him. But for now, it’s enough to give him use of the shower, the kitchen, and whatever else he needs. He even made off with a belt too tight for the druid’s not insignificant belly.

MY FAMILY NEEDS A CAR!!! PLEASE HELP ME!!!!

What’s the best job you’ve ever had, or ever hope to have?

My first job was as a babysitter. I cut my teeth on the children in the daycare room at church on Sundays, an unpaid gig that got me out of having to worship something I didn’t believe in and could not get out of. My mother “encouraged” me to get into the babysitting biz, by putting ads in the paper with my name on it. Thanks, mom.

I was not fond of providing childcare, but when my mom’s friends had things to do and needed a slave to chase rug rats around, I was volunteered. I didn’t do that well in school, but somehow I was expected to do homework in a strange person’s home while chasing after little brats who could not entertain themselves. I got away with only having to change a diaper a small number of times, because I never changed them while the parents were out. I detested this work, they knew it, and employed me anyway. I rarely got repeat customers. So yeah, not my best.

At 14, my mom decided I needed a job, and got me employment at a local motel doing linen and cleaning service. As I hated doing my own bed, I wasn’t sure what my mother was thinking, but I was told to suck it up for a day and see how it went. A wirey latina lady was assigned to show me the ropes, which were few–if the sheets are tousled, throw them into the industrial sized hamper, grab new sheets, fold them a certain way and tuck them in, don’t worry about the pillows, nobody ever thinks those are dirty anyway, rinse the tub if you see stuff, otherwise just leave it, don’t worry about the floor, and don’t forget to empty the garbage. My gosh, I saw so many hypodermic needles… No gloves, just told to clean in a lackluster manner and move on to the next room. Ew. Yeah, that lasted all of a day, a very long day in which the lady swore at me in Spanish because I was going so slow. They called me later and told me not to go back. I was very happy to heed my advice. So yeah, not my best there either.

Then there was the paper route. I was the substitute for the girl who lived on the next block, who had 4H and Girl Scouts and sports and about 20 other things she did. She showed me the route once, and expected me to remember which had subscriptions, and which did not. The route was four miles long. do you know how many houses there are in a suburb four miles big? I was given no map, no other indication of paper vs. no except by memory. Riiiiiight. I received a lot of complaints over my attempts. And people started and stopped subscriptions all the time, and I was never told which had been changed to what, so yeah, that was a losing battle. I lasted six months there. If I’d been given proper guidance, I might have been a lot more amicable about it. Definitely not my best.

Again pushed by my mother to do something, my next job was working at a fast food place, after I graduated. I did okay there, I lasted about a year, though the management kept scheduling me for hours I could not work–after 5pm, the last bus went by and I would be stranded in a city 70 miles away from home. That would not fly with me. One of my last straws was when one of the squirrely-eyed assistant managers was running around with glasses of water, splashing everyone and thinking it uproariously funny. I did not enjoy getting soaked, because I was 70 miles away from home and could not change, and so had to wear my wet clothes until they were dry. Yeah, no. I was eventually asked if I were mentally deficient. “Are you retarded?” Mr. Splashy asked me caustically one day, because he loved picking on me. That job started well but ended abruptly.

My next term of employment lasted two years, at the bakery/deli in my hometown. I was hired as a cake decorator, though they eventually stuck me at dishes in the bakery section, then shifting me over to the deli, as apparently my cake decorating skills were less than stellar. The deli was a disaster, I was expected to memorize everything after hearing it once. Again, no manuals, no written instructions, just one of the other girls going, “Here, do this,” and doing something too quickly for me to follow, and then being called upon to have picked it up immediately and be able to contribute equally. I became a store closer, cleaning and prepping the kitchen for the next day’s work, counting the till, getting the pastries defrosted, cakes reorganized and rotated, fryer emptied, scrubbed, and freshly oiled, rotating defrosted chickens in buckets filled with water in the cooler behind. I actually enjoyed that gig, but it ended abruptly when they needed to save money and downsize. They picked up a new manager who didn’t believe in cleaning, prepping, or customer satisfaction, who started yelling at me whenever I washed my hands after handling raw chicken and the like, and let me go. I was also asked there if I were mentally deficient, and by then, I was beginning to wonder. *shrugs*

My next bit of employment came through an internship at the college. We learned programming, networking, all the major computery stuff of the day. My internship? A five-minute thing in which I made backups of files at a paper mill by typing in one command, made sure the printer wasn’t jammed, and left. Good use of my talents, there. My friends all bragged how they were being called upon to program, and network, and set up computers, and tutor people, and they were offered employment where they were interning. I was doing something that they could have hired any one of the three other secretaries to do. It was a joke. I let go of that when I moved away and got married. SOOO not my best.

For the next fourteen years, I wasn’t employed at all. My husband wouldn’t let me outside the house without his supervision, and any calls for me regarding employment were met with him grabbing the phone, yelling very loudly into it that I already had a job as his wife, and hanging up, then berating me for even trying. In his mind, if I had employment, then I could eventually save up enough money to leave, as by that time he was becoming not only psychologically but physically abusive.

Even with that, I got occasional gigs doing website design for friends who wanted such. I liked that, I didn’t have to leave the house, I could dork around on the computer doing what I usually did anyway, and get paid for it. Cool! I didn’t get too carried away with that, though, as I had taught myself everything, and there were some things I could not do because of my morals–I will not download software illegally, and since Macromedia Flash and such cost hundreds of dollars each, I let those opportunities to learn pass me by.

During those fourteen years, I started and maintained a dogsitting and housesitting business, registering a business name, paying taxes, the whole thing. I even kept doing that when I moved back to my homestate, at the height of the ex’s insanity. I had to let that go when I moved to Portland, of course, as such a business requires clients, and this area seems very sufficiently tapped for that. That was fun, though wrought with angst concerning my ex’s abuse.

I worked for a year at a 24-hour drug store doing an overnight shift of fourteen hours at a time, 5-6 days a week. It was a brutal schedule but very fun. I didn’t get overwhelmed with customers in the middle of the night, and enjoyed being trusted with freight, stock, and other duties. The gun hold-up, and watching two testosteronally wonky men duke it out by the pharmacy were interesting tidbits.

I was working there the night that I got a phonecall in which I was told that my sister had passed away from cancer. Like an idiot, I told my supervisor, who began telling all the other employees, one of whom made a daily habit of invading my space for a clingy hug, in which she spoke of how happy my sister must be, kneeling at the throne of Our Lord, and how thankful I must be that my sister had passed away so young. I had to work after these awful hugs, holding back so many tears and just wishing to go home so that I could cry myself to sleep. The next night, she would bring up her Christian God and make me highly uncomfortable all over again. Ugh.

I wanted to yell at her that the reason it was so painful was because my mom wouldn’t tell me how she was doing, didn’t tell me she’d passed until after the funeral so that I could not attend, and then to this day refuses to tell me where my sibling is buried so that I can see her grave and pay my respects.

Sorry, didn’t mean to get carried away in that rant. Anyway, as for that job, they abruptly scheduled me for hours I could not work, as the busses stopped running for the night about two hours before my shift ended. I spent many a cold winter night at the bus station (I lived 20 miles away, I could not walk home), being repeatedly approached by the homeless, the tweakers, and a few gentlemen who wished me bodily harm. I didn’t feel safe there, natch, and started going home when the last bus came, ignoring my posted hours. I was told one night not to return the following day if I could not complete my shift as scheduled. I left when the last bus came. I was called just a few hours later, and told not to bother coming in again. Okie then.

My friend the dreamer has been putting together his grand business idea, requiring a website and a bunch of other internet-y things I’ve been asked to do, to which he compensates me whenever he can. There hasn’t been anything to do lately, but I enjoy the projects when they come.

Out of all of these, I particularly enjoy the website design gigs I’ve had. I wish I could find full-time (or even part-time) long term employment doing such. The dogsitting/housesitting business was fun, too. I liked very much being my own boss. There were very few complaints from my clients.

Though if I could, I’d do podcasting for a living. I neglected to mention the live radio show I had for about 8 months. That was quite enjoyable. I was still living with the ex at the time, though, and had to contend with him barging into the room while I was live, to yell at me about yet another offense I’d done, such as not having all the canned good labels facing the same way and such.

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Can you blog each day for an entire month? Try it!