My Fickle Fellow Citizens

I'm reading through the news, and I come across this: Bush Approval Rating Falls To 36%.

I've resigned myself to the fact that 52% of my fellow Americans decided that Bush was the best man to lead our nation for the next 4 years. But it kills me that now 15% of his supporters have changed their mind about him over the last year. It's insane - with the exception of Hurricane Katrina (which one can only vaguely blame Bush for, in a sort of "the buck stops at the President" fashion), things have pretty much been going according to plan. Even the most avid Bush supporter couldn't have expected our current situation to be any different - anyone with half a brain in their head knew that a year after the election the economy would still be sputtering (thanks to $3/gallon gas), people would still be dying in Iraq (we weren't going to pull out in 12 months no matter who won the election), the Republicans would still be pushing tax cuts for the rich and cuts in social services (duh), and Bush would try to fill the supreme court with judicial conservatives.

So I've gotta ask myself - why the hell did these people change their mind about Bush? What were they expecting? Were they not fucking paying attention during his first term? As I said, I could accept the fact that a majority of the voters supported Bush - I thought they were misguided, but OK, they have a different set of values than I do. But when a significant portion of them change their mind 12 months later, I have to figure that they don't actually have any values, and are just a bunch of gibbering idiots who don't put any more thought into their vote than "I'm gonna vote for the guy with the folksy twang in his voice".

How I broke a teenage boy's heart...

So, it's been a while - funny how spending your spare time remodelling the nursery, preparing for a new baby, and...*cough*levelling your warlock to 45 in WoW*cough*...can eat up your spare time.

As I've related previously, I mostly play an undead female Warlock named Cryptana - she's my "main", as the kids would say. I role play my character as a female, but I make no secret of the fact that I, the player, am a man. And yet...

A few weeks ago I was in a group in Scarlet Monastery - I'd just left my previous guild, so one of the guys in the group noticed that and invited me to his guild. I thought "what the heck", and joined him, and so began an interesting friendship. This kid was astoundingly nice - he'd always greet me when I logged in ("Cryptana! Hi sweetie!"), we often hooked up to do quests together, and he was always paying me the oddest compliments ("Wow, you're really cool for someone middle-aged", etc), which maybe should've tipped me off. But I just figured he was a nice kid who liked to play in character and enjoyed interacting with adults...

So we're out in Tanaris killing pirates the other day, and he mentions that he's going to have to log soon, as his mom gets mad when he plays too long. I laughed and said that I'd had a few conversations like that with my wife. And after a long pause, he writes back "Wait, you're a man?!?! But...why do you play a female character?".

And suddenly, everything is very, very weird.

Everything clicks into place, and we both realize that he's been trying to flirt with a 38 year old man for the past two weeks. And it's not really clear where the conversation goes after something like that...

As an experiment, a few years ago I played an online game where I pretended to be female (not just playing with a female name [Princess Dye], but I actually stated that I was a female player) and it's amazing how differently I was treated. The skills that made me a mediocre (at best) male player, got me no end of compliments as a female player. As a male player, I was just one of a faceless crowd, but as a female player, I was greeted enthusiastically whenever I joined the game, and had an entourage of faithful, gallant companions that would follow me about and fight by my side. I'm reluctant to draw any dramatic conclusions from that experience, but it was enough to convince me that a woman's experience in our world is very very different from a man's (duh).

So I guess we both learned something from our little encounter. I learned that people believe what their eyes tell them, so when someone sees my little female avatar, their brains tell them "woman" and they react accordingly, even if intellectually they know I'm not. And my young friend learned that if someone acts like a man, sounds like a man, and says he's a man, he probably is a man, even if his character looks like a girl. Very few women call themselves an "old man" as a figure of speech, it turns out.