Cover Fire

(from Stuff No One Told Me)

As I mentioned before, I started playing SC2 again with Teekay (and occasionally Olek). Teekay usually plays Zerg, but tonight he decided to play Terran for a bit. Most of my Terran/Protoss games have been play with Julian (some with Charles, but all he ever wants to do is proxy rax/gateway, so it doesn't count as a proper game), and tonight it made me realise how much I'm used to playing with him. By mid game he usually has plenty of tanks with siege mode out, and is probably teching for battlecruiser, so when I remember, I try to go phoenix to back him up. In my last game with Teekay, we were able to engage in middle, and they were setting up tanks, so I was waiting for Teekay to bring his along, too, so we could set up and fight. And waiting. And waiting. And they never came.

Despite the fact that they both have the Kerrigan portrait, Teekay isn't Julian, and his play-style is almost completely different. I know I should have looked to see what stuff he was building, but I guess I was too used to relying on a Terran partner to build certain stuff.

"Amazing discovery Anna, but how does it relate to us?" you might ask. Well, I think it says a lot about relationships, too. When you're in a relationship, after a while, you'll find that you tend to rely on the other person for certain things. You tend to expect certain things from the other person without even having to ask anymore. Whenever I have a jar or a bottle of water, I usually end up giving it to MrMan5.5 to open, and almost all of the time, he's waiting for me to finish my failed attempts at opening it so that he can give it a try.

Just as I find it so much easier to play with people I'm accustomed to playing with, I wonder how much of people's relationships are based on the fact that they are just used to being with whoever they are with? I admit, one of the reasons I was reluctant to give up AG was because he was a known entity. If I tried someone else, they could be better, but they could also be worse. I didn't want to have to go through all of the getting-to-know-you stuff again.

That's probably one of the reasons I'm not all that interested in meeting new people. You never know what kind of things might offend them, and even though they might be a friend of a friend, they doesn't mean they like all of the same things that you do. I went DVD hunting with QC at Highpoint a couple of months ago, and she invited her friend Social Anxiety David. I call him that because that's how she described him to me. After she said that, I wondered if I had to be extra careful around him, because I didn't want him to have a full-blown anxiety attack in front of me (I know, I'm a terrible person, I'm probably scared of epileptics, and I know someone else who also has social anxiety, and I didn't even find out she had it until a few years after I met her. She didn't seem any different to me at all).

At one point during our DVD hunt, I wanted to see if JB had an Arnie movie collection, but I didn't want anyone to steal the Arnie DVDs that I had already found, but hadn't paid for. QC had disappeared somewhere, so I had no choice but to ask David to hold them for me. I spent quite a while debating with myself whether he'd be OK with me asking him, and in the end, I just did it, and he seemed to have no problem with it. In fact, he was a really funny guy, and didn't seem any different at all. Plus, he found Pumping Iron for me and he likes Arnie, too.

I just realised that Social Anxiety David abbreviates to SAD. Oops. Anyway, he didn't turn out to be a crazy serial killer, so maybe getting out of your comfort zone isn't so bad - you might find some new people to laugh with.