I told you yesterday that my first experiences with storytelling were with Dungeons & Dragons and it reminded me of something. Role playing has also been one of my first experience with mortality. Not the game itself. I have nothing to bad to say about it. I think it's a leisure with a very bad reputation because of the typical people who play it. But that's it. There is a stereotypical role player and it's usually a person that's straight out of your worst nightmare. I had a role-playing "crew" when I moved to Montreal and they familiarized me with my own death and mortality by running straight to their own graves.
Let me tell you a story. In the RPG crew, there was this girl who played these wonderfully neurotic women characters. Let's call her Myrtle. Since I kept my character from beginning to end of the campaign and since he was a psychopath *, he kept falling in love with her characters. Because they were pretty damaged too. I thought it was a killer storyline/running gag. Well, Myrtle (and everybody else, but me) took this game pretty fucking seriously and her characters were all Mary Sues (extension of herself). She thought I was madly in love with her. You take a not-so-good-looking girl, with emotional problems, who thinks I'm in love with her. That's red flags all over the place. Worse that a football game. On top of that. She was dating that skinny, miniature guy I'll call Pedro. That was one of the reasons why I stopped gaming with these people.
Fast-forward two years...
I met Josie, we're dating and life is beautiful. We're in line for a Korean movie in Fantasia** and I suddenly feel the earth shake under my feet. I look up and what do I see? I shit you not. Myrtle, lumbering towards me, TWICE as big as when I've known her. I'm not kidding here. Physically twice as big. My jaw dropped to the floor with almost as much weight as her. Her eyes were full of birds and flowers, happy to see me. She probably thought she had a lot of effect to me also, because of my wide-eyes and my generally discombobulated self. Josie was digging in her purse for a pen and a paper, sure that she had just met the actor who played Jabba The Hut and the only thing I could tell Myrtle was: "Hey...where's Pedro?". I thought she dumped him. I heard a tiny voice from behind her saying: "I'm here". He was HIDDEN behind her. That's how fat she became over two years.
Now I'd like to make a distinction. There's a difference in between big and fat. I have big friends. Some are a bit overweight, but in tip-top shape, those guys would weight 240, maybe 250. They are made big. Big shoulders, big legs, thick neck. You see the genre. The wasn't big. Hell, I could remember a time where she was small enough. And I know exactly how it went down. I went to A & W with these people. I know their fucked up eating habits. After my encounter with Myrtle, I hit Facebook and investigated a little bit. Another couple who gamed with me underwent this kind of transformation through fat. The girl was maybe 110 lbs, she was miniature. Then, a few years later, she's twice as large and honestly looks deformed enough to be 220. Her arms are all fucked up and giggly. I had hopes for her now husband, he was the kind of guy who worked outside all day long, but now he looks like those little old men who are having heart attacks on golf courts.
There's nothing wrong with getting fatter with age. It's a normal reaction. Your metabolism slows down and your body is producing less hormones. I saw plenty of people taking weight with time. It's OK. I took maybe thirty pounds since high school myself. But there's a difference in between thirty pounds in ten years and a hundred pounds in two. That's fucked up. I really got scared when I met Myrtle in Fantasia. How can somebody to this to his body? As much as I love role-playing game, it's difficult enough to find compatible people to play with. The best thing I've learned from my early crew is to keep exercising, drink a lot of water, eat greens and have self-discipline.
* If you ever played Vampire: The Masquerade, I was playing a Malkavian.
** A killer movie festival in Montreal. All the new fucked-up Asian shit plays there.