You know your life needs improvement when the latest update to FFXI has you more geeked than anything else at the moment. It's so sad. Poker is tonight and I couldn't give a shit. I'm playing in a charity poker event on Saturday and that's not really seeming exciting to me either. But the thought of taking a half-day at work tomorrow and spending the rest of the weekend spamming the new absorb-TP spell and popping off 2-3 guillotines a fight? Totally giving me a boner. I so need to get laid, it's not even funny.

I blame where I'm living. I've always been a video gamer - and I do mean *always* - I am of the first generation to grow up never not having a computer of some sort around, and their games have always been a hobby of mine - but they have never dominated my life quite like this.

It's weird how I can reflect back on my life in terms of video games. How, when I was in elementary school, I was one of the first of my friends to own a Nintendo, and how that made me The Shit. How, in Junior High, I got into Dungeons & Dragons and used my hard-earned paper route money to buy up every RPG that my 386-25 could run (Eye of the Beholder, the Ultima series, and Ultima Underworld were some of the highlights). How, late in Junior High and early in High School, my friend Brac and I spent about a year, almost every day, working through every last secret of "Betrayal at Krondor", how we got together to play "Civilization", how our entire friendship revolved around computer games (until he discovered pot and abandoned me).

How, my Junior year of High School, a friend from the band named Matt started talking, in Advanced Algebra, about how he just picked up "Doom" and wanted to try out multiplayer over a modem, and how that became what we did that summer.

How, my Senior year, Matt and I discovered Warcraft 2, the game that would play a big part in my life for the next two years, even after I got a long-term steady girlfriend that would last me a year and a half (raise your hand if you've ever received head while playing Warcraft 2 against someone on the Internet, and still won the game. My hand is up).

How, in the college years that followed, Warcraft 2 would evolve to Age of Empires, which would evolve to Age of Kings.

How I balanced playing computer games with my girlfriend my Senior Year of college, despite the fact that for most of the year, we were, for all practical intents and purposes, living with one another.

How much Counter-Strike I played in those first couple of years out of school, working in Wisconsin, going home and playing until one in the morning.

The degree to which video games took over my life in the six months I spent unemployed following my first job falling through; Dark Age of Camelot, Diablo 2, and Counter-Strike ruling the day.

How my first gift to myself upon scoring a new engineering job was another computer, and a few nice games to go with it.

How, when I finally started to develop a close circle of friends in Wisconsin, video games were the glue that bound us; the late night Diablo 2 LAN parties, the all-night LAN party that Theo and I went to and destroyed everyone in Counter-Strike, in Warcraft 3, in pretty much anything and everything.

How Joe introduced myself and my friend Brian to a game called Final Fantasy XI, and the degree to which we took to it; leveling our first jobs to 75, Brian meeting a woman named Camille over the game and finally marrying her. Hopping from linkshell to linkshell together. Spending countless hours slaying mobs.

And yet, as I sit here today, celebrating my 5th anniversary of working for my current company, games seem more a part of my life than they ever have before, with the possible exception of the six months I spent unemployed. My time is mostly balanced between FFXI and online poker (and while poker is not a video game - though I find it fun, I'm not plaing it for fun, I'm playing it to make money), and the "friends" I've made down here have been few and far between.

I blame the region as much as anything. I've never been the person to surround myself with like-minded individuals; for one, they're too few and far between, and for another, I enjoy and thrive on diversity. Kindred spirits are few and far between, the degree of friend that just "gets" you, and when I've found those people, I've made lasting friendships, including with Toph, who's been a friend for over ten years. But down in this po-dunk middle-of-nowhere Bible Belt hell-hole, there simply is nobody.

Dave? Shares my fondness for video games, but has no passion for intellectualism. Irvin? Religion dominates his life, and he doesn't even own a computer. Bryan? See Irvin, minus the religion. These are good people to know, and good people to hang out with for this reason or that, but they aren't people that can hold their own with me in a discussion about movies, or music, or art, or literature, or politics, or - hell - or video games. That sounds unbelievably egocentric, I know, but that's not the way I mean it - all of these people are smart, and I know they have the capacity for complexity. What they lack is the interest. Their opinions are knee-jerk, and they know it, and they're content with it. They're the type of people you play golf with, not the type of people you have coversations with. Not bad people to know. Just not people you really want to hang out with all the time.

So, I find video games. The people I hang out with are no better, but the actions are more dynamic; they're a fundamentally fantastic way to avoid boredom (my dual-computer setup helps, since if I am doing something boring-but-necessary in the game, like looking for a party, I have the other computer, not to mention the XBox 360, which is now hooked up to that computer (via my TV software), where I can play Poker, or Civ IV, or Geometry Wars, but it's not exactly a "fulfilling lifestyle". I dunno ... most of the problem is that I hate my job, and that I hate the overriding culture of the area I'm living - overwhelming religious fundamentalism, political conservatism, and, (not-quite) ironically, enormous teen pregnancy (amazing that all the pushes for absinence, as an adjunct to the lack of availability or support for birth control). I complain about the lack of single women my age, and it is a problem, although the fact of the matter is, I make more than $70k a year in a rural area and drive a red Nissan 350Z convertible, so if I wanted "it", I could certainly get "it". The biggest obstacle in the way of that is the fact that I am unwilling to lower my standards in order to do so. I'm not interested in ready-made families (as Jay in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin put it", "You don't want no baby-daddy drama!), I'm not interested in women that are uneducated and have no desire to become educated, and who have no career aspirations, no ambitions, no desire to live their lives in less than a thirty-mile radius. So, while there are single women in my podunk middle-of-nowhere town, some of whom are no doubt around my age, the culture of intellectual sub-mediocrity, particulary evident when combined with the prevalent stereotypes of female intellectuals that persist with reckless abandon around here, the overwhelming religiosity, and the culture of "marry young and start popping out kids" all conspire against my ability to meet anyone that could possibly conform to my standards. It's been done - Dave's fiancee Shamra fits all of my specific criteria, and he met her down here, although I state for the record that I could never be with Shamra, for other, more basic reasons (she would annoy the fuck out of me) - but, 2-7 offsuit occasionally outruns pocket aces, too.

There are positives in my life. I have a great network of friends outside of the area. I'm making money hand over fist. I've bought an awesome car. I'm honing my writing skills. I'm not letting my brain go to waste. And yet I have this overwhelming fear that when I'm 40, I'll look back at the time I spent between 27 and 30 and declare it all lost time, a blank card sandwiched between more active and fruitful years.

At least I'll remember that I gamed like a motherfucker.