Nurse Goodbody

As I've been doing for the past several evenings, I work on projects and papers for my law class I'm currently taking and then play a little online "City of Heroes" to decompress before bedtime. I've been working on my healing character, GoodFellow RN, for a bit and have him to a point where he's being invited to join temporary teams to go wail on the Evil and do some major damage to the sewer zombies.

So last night as I'm playing on this team of five others, we're rocking along, taking orders from the leader, Jean Greene (an obvious knock-off of Jean Gray from the X-Men), and she's so bossy but in a way that shows she knows what she's doing so it's ok. For my part, I'm so inexperienced and unfamiliar with playing video games that I just press the fire buttons rapidly, hoping to just hit whatever is standing in front of me. It's a working strategy that so far, no one has complained yet. As the team healer, a Dr. McCoy, of sorts, it's my job just to keep blasting out healing aura's which add damage resistance to everyone around me. Sounds impressive but looks like I'm ripping a HUGE fart that ripples out in all the neon-green splendor you can imagine. It's not subtle.

So as were heading deeper and deeper into the bowels of the sewer, kicking ass this way and that, Jean suddenly stops and says, "I have to take off, my dad is yelling at me to get off the computer and do my homework," and for the first time, I realized I wasn't playing with other 34-year olds sitting at home, marinating in their pathetic, wasting lives; I'm playing with TEENAGERS who are trying to get out of doing their seventh-grade book reports on "Catcher in the Rye".

So not exactly a confidence boost, I'm thinking. AND I've wasted the subtle queer undercurrents of my hero and his fahizzle-shizzle costume on know-nothings at best and probably future fag-bashers at worst.