...is not being able to sleep on my nights off. Because I work such a strange shift (10PM-6AM Thursday-Monday nights, for those unaware), on my two nights off, it's basically impossible for me to sleep during the time when everyone else sleeps unless I starve myself of sleep during the day, which makes it very difficult to do stuff even on my days off. This, incidentally, is one of the big reasons it's taken me so long to get back to the gym. On top of that, since I have such odd days off, I don't get to see my friends without an appointment...and sometimes I have to call in sick to be able to make those appointments. This problem is magnified by the fact that my friends live pretty far away. My closest friend, Jason, lives in Riverside, which isn't too horribly far away, but he's busy with his teaching job, his swing-dancing career, and his girlfriend, Sarah...the latter of which isn't so bad, since Sarah's a sweetheart and has started joining us at our game nights.
However I must admit making a bit of a faux-pas at the last event she joined us at; another friend, Ben, was introducing a new game concept to us and Sarah, myself and a third friend volunteered to be Guinea pigs to help test it. Forgetting that we were just doing a friendly run-through of the game, my competitive instinct took over, and I and my third friend basically left the poor dear lady sitting on the starting line. Had this been, say, a poker game, with money and marbles at stake, this might be somewhat acceptable behavior (after all, as the saying goes, it's a sin to let a sucker keep his money), but in this case, I am rather ashamed of myself. Being competitive is one thing, but callously going full bore while playing against someone playing merely to have fun tends to leave a bitter taste in the other person's mouth...the kind of thing I have always tried to avoid in my dealings with others, especially someone part of our little group who's present primarily in support and affection for my friend than necessarily sharing any of our interests.
Jason, if you're reading this, please give Sarah a hug for me.
The rest of my friends, whom I refer to as the "Ruly Mob," live quite a bit farther. Ben and his roommate Tim live all the way up in Glendale, just up the street from the famed Galleria mall (and the new Americana center that just opened there), another friend, Matt, lives all the way up in Valencia, which means at least an hour - sometimes two if traffic sucks, and the greater Los Angeles area is infamous for its shitty traffic conditions - to get to my house if I were to invite him. Tim works the same kind of casino job I do (though he works at the newer Hustler Casino, while I work at the larger Commerce Casino) and Ben is a night auditor at a Marriott hotel in Burbank, and they have different days off than I do, so they have to make appointments to hang out, the same as I do.
I do know at least one family who is friends with our little group who live nearby, but I am never entirely sure of their schedule either. Jeff, the dad, is a toxicologist at the famed UCI Medical Center, and Julie, the mom, is an accountant. They have two daughters; Maddie is older and is just entering adolescence, while Emma is near the tail-end of grade school. Jeff, Julie and Maddie have all been fairly successful contestants on quiz-shows; unlike most of my little group, these guys are more interested in playing the games as contestants, than in creating and producing new shows, like myself the rest of the Mob. Jeff and Maddie have both been on Jeopardy! Maddie played on a Back-to-School Week, winning over $22,000, and Jeff was one of the legendary Ken Jennings's victims, though Jeff played like anything BUT a victim, being one of the few to legitimately challenge the quiz show legend on equal footing. Julie was on the Meredith Vieira-hosted incarnation of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, winning $64,000. The four of them are as close to the perfect American family as one could imagine; attractive, outgoing, eminently likable and whip-smart (not to mention socially-aware, unlike most geeks), making them ideal contestants.
They are also big board game players, too, much like the Mob, but their taste runs toward heavier and more complicated fare, such as so called "Eurogames" - games with in-depth and innovative but easy-to-understand mechanics relying less on luck and more on strategy and featuring higher production values than most mainstream board games, so named because of their origins in Europe in particular - than my closer friends who favor game show adaptations (often featuring questions we've written ourselves! I told ya we were geeks :D) and party games. Jeff is particularly into these kinds of games; while Maddie, for example, is an Apples-to-Apples junkie, Jeff's favorite is Civilization, a 70s-era monster (with horrendously complicated gameplay and marathon playing time) that was responsible for inspiring computer programmer Sid Meier to create his 90s-era masterpiece.
Indeed, so into gaming is Jeff that he went so far as to create an introductory Powerpoint presentation for a game called Puerto Rico, which is about as shining an example of the Eurogame genre as one can get incidentally, and which he showed to Maddie's teenaged friends at a recent game night in an effort to get them to play it with him. Now mind you, I'm all for bringing new blood to the table (especially to play such a fun and well-designed game as Puerto Rico) but even I have to question putting so much time and effort into what is essentially a diversion (an opinion, I might add, that Julie shares with me). After all, even a guy who calls himself "Game Show Man" can't live on game shows alone. Even so, they are dear friends, and I wish I could hang out with them more often. But alas, I can never be sure when they're available, since Jeff is pretty much on call all the time.
And so, I sit here, banging on the keys, going slowly mad while I wait for my chance to shine...and some friends to share the moment.
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