Now board games night is literally just a bunch of guys playing board games. Well, not limited to board games- I saw some guys playing Magic the Gathering. I thought Hearthstone was all the craze nowadays- I mean, I used to play Magic myself but I was like, 14. It was so weird watching all these guys who are at least 24 having an intense Magic duel.
Can you feel the intensity yet?
Anyway I show up to the night expecting to be like, the new kid in a closed group- and I kind of was but people were really friendly and welcoming. That makes what I'm about to say really fucking mean, but I'm going to say it anyway- I think half that club is just made for kids with learning disabilities somewhere on the autism spectrum. There were a few "normal" guys who were just extra geeky, then there were some kids with obvious behaviour patterns that you recognized were part of the "special needs" cohort. I think most people there, to a certain degree, entertained a level of social awkwardness that determined they would be incompatible in an unprotected and open environment. Like, if this was high school and they went out onto the playground, they would get bullied. I'm not saying bullying is right and kids should really have more decency, but there are things you can say or do that attract a bully's attention- and these kids are full of it.
I start the night by casually sliding into a game of Cards Against Humanity (CAH). If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a party game where a question is asked, and you have a variety of responses on cards in your hand--- and you try to pick out the most disturbing answer possible that fit the context of the question. Anyway, I join the table without much complication- introductions were unnecessary and I really have to say even in my casual clothing, I looked so well dressed that I didn't belong. Everyone seemed to sport a uniform of track pants and t shirt, with a hoodie on top and worn sneakers on their feet. I guess everyone else felt it too- the fact that I wasn't really one of them, I guess, but CAH is actually an excellent game for assimilation into a new party. Soon they learnt that my moral inhibitions were close to non-existent as I dished out disturbing answer after disturbing answer- so that went quite well.
Not that the game passed without any awkward moments. Sitting there I noticed that the guys around me tended to laugh even when the answers weren't that funny, but it was more than the polite laugh you made around strangers- it was the "I genuinely think this funny" laugh. I mean, if you want to call me out on having a different sense of humour, that wouldn't strictly be incorrect, but it was fucking weird man. Then at our table was this Asian kid whose first language obviously wasn't English (sounded like he was from Hong Kong, actually) but he wasn't shy about it at all. That's not a bad thing, of course. No, what was bad was the fact that we were playing CAH with someone who didn't speak English fluently in the first place. Sometimes we'd laugh and this kid of would look seriously confused, and then you'd be forced to explain to him why it was so funny, but as you did so you felt oh-so-fucking-guilty because you literally just laughed at "Auschwitz" as an answer and you were desperately hoping no one at the table was Jewish.
Many awkward things had to be explained to this kid over the night, and among them were scrotum, queefing and pixlated bukkake. If you don't know what the last one is, I recommend not searching it on Google until you are no longer at work or school. #NSFW There I literally bolded the warning.
After one finished round of CAH I bailed to playing Pictionary. Naturally my team won, though I only made minor contributions. We had this guy studying architecture on our team and man you could tell he was a good drawer. I mean, I draw a fair bit but when I play pictionary you'd be lucky if you could guess something even vaguely related. So collectively we had 2 people who can draw and there was another guy who was genius at guessing- he won us the game by saying "irrigation". Like goddamn I know architecture guy actually drew an excellent picture of irrigation- complete with pipes, surrounding land and water, but the word irrigation just would've never occurred to me.
Now after pictionary was really when I should've excused myself and bailed the fuck out, but instead I was roped into playing another game called Munchkin. It was one of the most unnecessarily complicated games I've ever seen- it wasn't very much like Magic the Gathering- I mean there was strategy involved but most of it came from not having players at the table spite the shit out of you, and drawing the right cards to save your own sorry ass. I got bored very quickly and I was no where close to winning the game because I had lost all interest. I kept on playing though, despite everything, because the guy who was winning and coming up big was the guy who knew all the rules and was super-enthusiastic about the game. In the 5 player game there was me and one other person who was bored to shits, but we didn't really want to steal this guy's sunshine because he was winning and because he was trying so hard to teach us the rules, but everything was so goddamn complicated, it didn't even make sense as we were playing the game. Anyway super-enthusiastic guy won in the end (surprising no one) and it was like half past nine before the night ended.
When I got to the bus stop I realized I missed the bus by 30min (so I really should've just left early when the game bored me to shits) and the next bus was due in 30min. Awful feeling. So I was stuck at the bus stop, being bored, and my phone had just died on me because it ran out of battery and I was left to being so goddamn bored. When I got home I resolved that I am never doing this shit again, but despite my inability to make friends I think I had good time. Like, the fact that I can't really get into the mood and laugh along at most things isn't really their fault- it's hard to assimilate into the group that you identified as "kids scoring hell high on the autism scale". But just because I suspect them of having social problems doesn't necessarily mean I can't have a good time around them... ya? Am I sounding desperate for company yet? I'm pretty fucking desperate for company.
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