I have never been so nervous in my entire life.
Tuesday was spent mostly in Campus-town, house-hunting. 'House' in this case means 'apartment', but the hunting was quite literal; my friend and I visited nine locations, all different from the ones I'd checked out about a week and a half back. We got a nice place, about $375/mo [total] including water and cable, five blocks from campus. My college is a little touchy about their funds and won't release surplus money to students until a few days before the start of school, so my friend handled the deposit when we picked the place. We move in Friday. I'm going to be spending all day tomorrow finding stuff and organising stuff and packing stuff and disassembling stuff; basically I'm taking my entire life up to campus this year, which is a huge first for me.
And then once I'm moved in, I'm going to spend the entire weekend on the streets looking for work.
This is part one of the nervous. I'm committing to this apartment deal, I want it very much, but the summer's monetary plans fell completely through as usual, so at this point I no longer have a choice. I will get work somewhere because I will be able to pay for this living space no matter what. I really don't care if I have to go find some stables on the outskirts of town and shovel horse poo for six hours a day.
I also really need a car. Which, as I've said before, also requires a job, not only for the initial purchase but also for gas and insurance and maintenance. Now, I have been given a rumor via my mother that my father is thinking about using some of "the life-insurance money he's getting" to look into getting me one, and that . . . well, first off it makes me wonder what "life insurance money" he's getting and why because I don't recall anyone related to us dying recently, but if the rumor is true and he does then I don't really know if I'll have the capacity to express how grateful I am for the gesture. I mean, sure there have been remarks about how they're proud of me for going four years at college with no vehicle and never griping or bellyaching about it, but at the same time I thought it was sort of understood that I would be buying my own. My first sister bought her own—several of them by now because each one keeps dying miserably—and I really respect that. And we're not a well-off family by any means. We're comfortable, and we have our needs met, but what luxuries we have don't come and go on a whim. So I was never going to ask for a car; heck, I infuriate my family because I never ask for anything for birthdays or Christmas (because what I want/need is out of the price range).
So that's another potentially big deal.
But then my friend is starting to give me cause for mild concern as well. And this is hard for me to have to approach because on my end, I still am unemployed, and if anyone is to be expected to have problems paying rent it's going to be me. But at the same time....
Well, first, he's got a moderately obsessive personality. To his credit, it only involves things and activities that multiple people can do together and that are either easily accessed by everyone or easily provided by him for communal access. Smash Brothers was one. Ping-pong was another, and Risk and Euchre and Hero Quest, and eventually Rock Band. And every one of these are really fun to do. The only thing I've ever begrudged him regarding them was that he takes these activities, as I indicated, to an inordinate level of constant-involvement: when he gets hooked on something, he literally wants to do it as often as possible and will create as many opportunities to shanghai friends into them.
And I mean that. It isn't so much his asking, though, as it is his reaction when people decline. He gets dejected (making no attempt to mask it) and mopes about how boring things, or he'll comment rather tactlessly on whatever's occupying us. One conversation that stands out to me went:
Friend:"Oh, hey man! Dude! If you jump in now, we'll have four people for this game of Risk!"
Me: "Sorry, man, can't. I'm heading over to BFA; got jazz rehearsal starting in twenty minutes."
Friend: "Oh.... That sucks, dude."
The last statement was said in the exact same tone as if I had said my car had been T-boned and the insurance company had decided not to pay for anything. What he was reacting to, of course, was the part where me being gone and unable to join in sucked for him, but that's never how it came across. Along with that, he tends to apply a psychological tactic, the name of which eludes me, where a person who wants a particular answer to a question (usually yes or no) will first ask a series of questions that can easily be answered with the desired response, and then asking the 'important' question at the point where the response is partially reflex. Along with that, if you don't answer the 'right' way, you have now become the bad guy for not giving in to such a 'simple request'.
His current obsession is Dungeons and Dragons. And again, I have nothing against the game—as should be plainly obvious since I'm playing it—and do in fact enjoy it, and I'll most likely join several sessions at some point this year. As I mentioned in the concert post, pretty much the whole waiting period I read up on the 4th Edition ruleset he's going to be using, since there wasn't much else to do. But I've seen him three times in the past week, and each time he was essentially oozing the game and talking about how he could work ways to play the game more, or with more people, and how I'd need to come up with a campaign of my own so I could take a turn being DM. Tuesday while we were eating lunch he mused aloud about wanting to find a place where people could hang out all day and play D&D and eat at a provided buffet. His first question when we met that day (at eleven-thirty in the morning) was whether we might have enough time for a quick "pick-up" campaign—an idea I quickly squashed very hard with the phrase "Today is strictly business"—and then when we were finished his first thought was if we had time for the same thing.
I want to try this game out, and I think it can be fun. But I'm still in school, and I'm going to have a job, and I'm going to be trying to get out and be social with the people in my department/classes. I don't want to spend every minute of my free time playing or thinking about or developing ideas for Dungeons and Dragons. First off, it's unhealthy. Second, we're now supposed to be mature adults, and we have responsibilities that we can't just toss aside any longer; we haven't got parents around to shelter us from those. Third, I want to do other things with my personal time. I'm going to want to read or play a personal game or listen to music or write or (gasp) practice my horn for once in my life, or get outside and walk around and play frisbee.
I know he's going to bring it up whenever he can, and I'm not looking forward to that. I was told several times during the concert trip that I should spend the road time coming up with a campaign concept (literally "you should come up with one in the next five hours"), and my apparent obligation to construct said campaign came up again on Tuesday.
But that's not the biggest issue. And, really, the biggest issue isn't one I have with him personally, it's one he's making for himself in general. It's a potentially disastrous situation he's taken upon himself, and I don't know if he sees all the ramifications of it right now. He and I are both definitely adults by now. He just recently turned twenty-two, I'm going to soon turn twenty-three. He's had a girlfriend for about a year now, and from what I witnessed during the concert trip, they're very unshy about displaying affection. When we stayed at the hotel, instead of me and him sharing a bed so she could be by herself, they slept together and I took the other one.
His girlfriend is sixteen.
Guys, it doesn't matter what your views on a person's lifestyle are. If there's any sexual relations going on there, that's statutory rape. It doesn't matter if whatever it is happens to be consensual. It doesn't matter if she initiates it. She is by law a minor, and he is not. So if she gets it into her head that she can get money out of him, or if they get into trouble over something, or come anything that involves a court system, the law is going to be against him automatically.
Two years from now she'll be eighteen and he'll be twenty-four, and it won't be an issue at all. And there's nothing wrong with that. But that's then. This is now. And right now, he could get into serious, permanent trouble by making a thoughtless decision, and there will be nothing anyone can do about it.
All his so-called faults aside, he's still my friend. He moved here a year after I did. I stopped being the new guy because he replaced me. We've been sort of casual friends since the seventh grade; we lived down the street from each other, we played Smash Brothers and Magic on many weekends, and we installed the middle-school's mathematics computer lab together. I may not count him as one of my best friends, but he's still definitely a friend of mine, and I do not want to see him get into irreparable trouble for something as simple as a foolish notion of momentary pleasure. And, like, he's already indicated to me that she's probably going to be spending the odd weekend at our place, if not every weekend, despite her living an hour and a half away, and still being in high school. (I asked.) So when we get moved in this weekend, I'm going to have to talk with him about this just to make sure he knows what he's getting into.
I don't want to have this conversation.
Plus, you know, I'm not really all that comfortable with knowing people are shagging in my house. So in the event that he does know what he's getting into and he's fine with that, and assuming there is something happening between them in that respect, I'm going to at least ask him for a couple of days warning for when she's staying for a few nights so I can hitch a ride home or find a way to crash somewhere else.
This is a serious, serious moment in my life.
