Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5028801" data-attributes="member: 54707">I don't know UO. I'm gonna wax serious a moment.I wasn't weak, though I was a runt (undersized for a long time), and didn't grow my last two inches until a sophomore in college. However I did play plenty of sports, football, soccer, ran track and cross country, baseball, etc. I played basketball too but being a runt was never good at much below the net, I was an outside shooter.Spent a lot of time in the woods too, so I was an outdoorsman, or outdoors-boy, as a kid.I also didn't play D&D (and that was about the only rpg available at the time) because it was substitute for other games, or physical activity. I always liked a lot of physical activity and even risk and danger. I was and still am attracted to that, but I've been injured so often now that I'm pretty selective now about how and if I get busted up.I don't know about being some flavor of mental. Assuming I'm reading ya right. I was pretty popular in most circles and moved easily between jocks and nerds and just regular Joes. I didn't particularly favor any group and none seemed to either favor, or disown, me. I think I got along pretty well with most any and all kinds of folks because of my sense of humor and because I was a bit of a wild-ass.Playing D&D did interest me, then again so did War-games and Risk and Chess and Ogre and Battleship and setting off fireworks in the mall parking lot and seeing if I could outrun the mall cops, and getting into sword fights with my buddies. (I guess that could be called my flavor of mental). I think to me it was just a very interesting activity, one among many, but one which was so unseal at the time that it was fascinating not only for the potential benefits, but for the novelty. It was sort of like brain-danger and adventure, and vadding of the imagination to me.It didn't make me feel like an outcast in any way, but it was a sort of selective hobby in the fact that not everyone dug it, or was impressed by it.I do/did/have always read a lot and consider myself generally intelligent, but I'm not one a those modern intellectual types who feel that intelligence is the most important attribute any person can ever possess (I've run into my share of those kinds of fellas though, and never much cared for that attitude). Intelligence is an advantage in many situations but I think of other attributes as both more honorable and noble, and as more important. Like virtue, courage, or wisdom, for example.I also was fascinated, if that is the term, by magic, but in an abstract way, for what it implied about possible scientific and psychological capabilities. I never much got the idea of magic as an imaginary power source, but I did get the concept of magic as a source of empowering the imagination. I did and others did consider myself a nerd in some ways, an anti-nerd in others, however back then in my neck of the woods it was more common to call such a fella a brainiac, which really didn't imply anything about social status. It seems to me the popular association between nerdines and clumsiness and anti-athleticism and social dufus came much later. A lot of the kids I grew up with were expected to be both good athletes and good students and smart and sociable. Most of the line of my high school football team were also in AP lit and math and physics classes, for example. And most were well-liked. There really wasn't a dividing line between good physical capabilities, and good mental capabilities, and I'm hopeful whatever later artificial lines that have developed in popular culture, regardless of how true, untrue, or stereotypical, are rapidly disappearing. I much prefer Renaissance men and women to the idea of tightly regulated and overly-classified Nerd, Geek, Jock, Popular type sub-categories. Most folks can and should do far more than walk and chew gum at the same time.I know by the way you were just generalizing and I'm not criticizing your points in your post. Sometimes it's almost essential to generalize to make a basic point. I guess I'm just saying it might not always be evident that motivations express themselves in the same way with every individual, or maybe even more generally speaking. That is to say that although general motivations can seem similar, perhaps they always express uniquely or individually. Or, put another way, appearances are not always appropriate indicators of actuality.I got in a fix like that one time and my roommate and I had to move to another dorm. Ah, the vicissitudes of youth.</blockquote>

Verification