so alright. i spent most of today enjoying an internal M:TG league at work. friday is always a bit slow, being a half day, and i’m enjoying the xploration of the card game with the folks who actually make them.
i come home and bring my deck thinking i’ll have the same kind of fun with my roomie.
boy, am i wrong. by the time we finished three games, i’m pissed off and really don’t want to do more than go to my room, close the door, and pretend i’m living alone.
what causes this?
i’ll tell you what — my roomie is so competitive that it is a physical impossibility to play anything with him for fun.
now mind you, i’m fully expecting to lose all the games because he is playing with legacy cards that were tuned for simpler mechanics and written with broad based play in mind.
i knew going in that i would lose every game, but perhaps here and there, we’d have some fun along the way.
but no. it isn’t good enough to beat me, roomie has to argue over mechanics and rub my nose into the fact that ‘my new cards’ aren’t as ‘uber’ as his old ones. (as if i don’t know this.)
and when it comes down to using certain mechanics, it isn’t good enough to disagree over something about how they play out, we have to actually stop the game and go look them up because heaven for-fucking-fend he might not WIN.
turns out i’m wrong. hey. no worries. we continue playing. i lose. of course. as expected. he asks if i want to play one more. sure, i say. why not.
then, i notice it.
what do i notice? the smug way he’s sitting over there. he’s not enjoying the game, the playing, he’s only enjoying that i’m losing.
i ask him what his ‘life’ total is at. he smugly tells me it’s 24. and i decide it just isn’t worth playing anymore. all the enjoyment i had at the thought of playing has been leeched out in the face of realizing he doesn’t care about playing WITH ME, or having fun WITH ME, he only cares about BEATING ME.
‘i concede. i can’t win.’
he looks surprised and i can tell he doesn’t even realize i’m angry… let alone why.
i pack my deck up and come to my room. close the door softly and sit down to write this. the question is… why am i crying?
but i already know the answer. i don’t give two shits about who wins when i’m playing my roomie. i want to enjoy being able to play. i want to have fun with it. but, for some unknown reason, my roomie can’t play anything with me without feeling the need to dominant, domineer, and rub it in.
i’m not real sure i understand why, but in this moment it has me angry and more than a little sad. i have an inkling as to why this may be happening and i really don’t want to think i could be right. on the other hand, i’m angry with myself that it even bothers me this much.
why should it? why does it?
bah. i’m going to bed. maybe tomorrow i will wake up and feel a little less annoyed at the notion that someone i like to think of as a friend takes entirely too much enjoyment in humiliating me every chance they get…. or what that may mean.