On bumptiousness

Look I don't mean to be a boor here but I have to say I would like some accolades and adulation. A team of heralds, maybe. You know just some guys with big trumpety things wearing my custom livery in a tasteful sea-foam green with fine silver-thread embroidery. They could give a little tootle whenever I open up recount. This goes for when I'm healing too of course, I'm thinking maybe a cheering section for the HPS meters. I'd be ok with showers of rose petals. I wouldn't say no to that.

I mean, I've got my boyfriend, and I suppose that's nice. "Look!" I say, "look at all these damages I did! I did the most of them. More than the other people."

"Mm." he says.

"Boyfriend." I hiss (yes, we do address each other with relationship titles sometimes; "Mr. Friend" is popular as well). 

"Mm?" he says.

"Notice this recount! Admire it!"

"Mm." he says again. "Very nice. We could print out a screenshot and put it on the fridge if you want?"

The problem of course is that I'm well aware of how unbelievably off-putting and juvenile it is to do stuff like this. Literally juvenile! Kids are forever bringing over a thing for you to notice and praise. They'll put some masking tape on a lego and draw a smiley face on it and then thrust it at you until you exclaim in disbelieving wonder "by George it's a working philosopher's stone!"

So once you reach the wizened age of, you know, maybe ten or eleven you have to start figuring out how not to do this any more.

To be honest I still haven't really gotten a lid on it. But since I know it's really insufferable behavior, I try to tamp it down.

I'm pretty successful when it comes to not actually posting or talking about damage meters. I mean, I slip up! I definitely do it sometimes. But eighty to ninety per cent of the time, I'm able to suppress that particular impulse.

The real problem, the thing I almost always succumb to, is when a particular deadly cocktail is brewed. The ingredients are thus:

• Insecurity in comparison with another person's in-game achievements
• That this person is a fairly recent acquaintance
• Who I would like to be friends with

So in effect I really want to go "I'm pretty awesome at WoW! So you should totally be friends with me!"

This results in awkward locutions about how proud I am of my guild's current progress of 2/8 heroic DS-10 while at the same time I'm aware that a great many persons or guilds would consider that level of progression to be embarrassingly poor. Even now I'm fighting back the urge to add little caveats and qualifications and clauses so that the theoretical readers of this post won't sneer at me.

It's tough!

I'm not alone in this, right? I am probably not the only person that has to keep a lid on their inner bloviator, right? I know this is a pretty random post for this blog, but I'd love to hear anyone else's stories or strategies for keeping this tendency in check.