Question 13 – What is wrong with you?

For most of my life I never had a headache.  My head hurt from getting kicked once but that’s different I think.  Headaches were a thing that I kind of thought was made-up, like people were just being babies and complaining about nothing.  Brain freeze or the ice cream headache in particular seemed like bullshit.  But now that I’m old and weak I’ve had a headache a few times.  Today I had a bad one but it went away after I did my daily time on the treadmill – yeah, I totally walk on treadmill.  One time I told my doctor that and he was like “YOU?!”  I’m pretty sure afterwards he put in his chart “liar?”  Clearly what this means is that headaches are caused by have too much fluid in your body and sweating it out makes it go away.  I don’t mean to brag but I sweat a lot when I exercise.

I’m probably going to start another blog.  I’d like to make that website look nice but I don’t really know how.  If anyone wants to help me with that please do.  It’s going to be more short fiction making up a long narrative and the main character is probably going to be a woman.  As someone who’s been often time quoted as saying that men shouldn’t write women as their main characters because it’s awful I don’t know why I do that.  I went back and looked at my writing from college and the couple years afterwards when I did tons of writing and most of the stuff either has no main character, has a male main character that is an archetype and the gender is meaningless, or has a female main character.  There’s nothing I’ve written with a male character where the character is important. 

So the question is, what’s wrong with me?  There’s definitely a group of male people in the RPG world that almost every if not every character they make is a sexy sexy sexy elf with sex.  They’re often people that embody many of the stereotypes about gamers – namely that they’re not getting any loving and probably never will.  They (usually) aren’t being weird and sexual in the game, but there’s clearly something they get out having a sexy sexy sex lady character.  I’ve had a few female characters in RPGs but OBVIOUSLY it’s not weird when I do it.  I don’t think this is my problem but since I don’t really understand why it happens it’s hard to say.  If you’re a middle-aged man in a too-small anime convention shirt whose characters all are hot 17 year old Japanese girls let me know what your deal is.

Another theory I have is that I feel more comfortable having a female character show emotion.  Just writing that makes me cringe because it sounds douchey like I think I’m a real writer.  I am not, I’m just someone who likes to write – I’m not invoking any emotional responses.  I don’t know the difference between drama and melodrama, I don’t know the difference between succinct description and purple prose, I don’t have a style nor a voice, I just like writing.  A real writer would never write “maze of excitement” because a maze is a physical object and excitement is conceptual.  A real writer doesn’t overstate to make a point.  A real writer doesn’t use redundancy.  A real writer doesn’t enumerate every aspect of an action.  A real writer doesn’t say “horror beset” because you can’t be beset by horror, only something horrific. 

Anyway, it may because that I am so tough and manly in real life and men are supposed to deny and hate feelings (and I do) I like writing a female character because they can he happy or disappointed or hungry or feel anxiety and that’s okay because they’re just women.  It’s as misogynistic as it is nonsensical.  Nonsensical on account of the main feedback I’ve gotten about why I suck at writing female characters is because they act like men. 

Another theory is that I prefer female characters because I kind of hate dudes.  Aside from the friends I’ve had since 5^th or 6^th grade (it’s a point of contention amongst us) who are the best, I generally don’t like other dudes.  They’re kind of gross.  Is that because when I was a little little kid the only other kids in my neighbor were girls and I never really had a male friend until I was 11?  Probably not.  Remember back in the old days when your friends were determined mostly by who lived near you?  If someone lived in your neighborhood AND liked the same thing as you they were your best friend.  I wonder how it works now what with the internet at all.  Are kids friend with a Vietnamese kid they “know” from playing fortnite on xbox live and they Instagram each other all the time?  How would I know?

But enough blatherskate about my writing (a real writer doesn’t use a noun as a verb) let’s look at what else is wrong with me.  I could go on and on, it’s one of my favorite topics, so I’ll just put together a top ten list here –

1. I don’t eat any leafy greens
2. I don’t know anything about web design
3. I like talking about what’s wrong with me too much
4. I’m kind of a know it all
5. I have a bad habit of not saying anything when someone says something that I have no opinion on, I just think about it in my brain and then realize I’ve been quiet for a long time
6. I don’t give much to charity and I never volunteer
7. I have way too many t-shirts
8. I don’t floss
9. I hate raking leaves
10. I don’t put my boxes in the recycling often enough so I have a big box pile in the back room

Conclusion – Lots of things are wrong with me, but on the plus side I’m mostly harmless.