Elevator Etiquette

I live on the 8th in a flat that’s 18 stories high, so naturally there’s an elevator present. It’s slow, small, and sometimes it stinks, but it’s an elevator nonetheless. Now I read an article somewhere that people don’t greet each other anymore in elevators. We don’t seem to have that problem. In our elevator it’s custom to say bye when someone leaves, and if you happen to get in while there’s already people inside, you say hi. The rest of the ride you spend actively not looking at each other, this includes avoiding the big mirror on the far side of the elevator because it might look like you’re checking people out in the mirror or worse, checking yourself out. I usually spend the time looking at the numbers changing above the door, and searching for the right key to use when I get out. Anything to drive away the awkward silence when you’re just standing there staring straight ahead, suddenly aware of every tiny detail of your appearance, like the way you’re standing, the way a sniff is suddenly super loud in the otherwise silent elevator, and the way you raise your hand to wipe away a stray hair. It’s all suddenly awkward.

There’s another thing about elevators that bothers me. I don’t know if I’m alone in this observation but let me explain it like this. Have you ever gotten onto an elevator and someone else joined you and he or she presses the 1st floor button. This person is not injured in any way that you can see, he’s not on skates or otherwise stairway-challenged. And when said person gets off on the 1st floor, I can’t help but think to myself he should’ve just taken the stairs. Saving the rest of us some time and giving himself a tiny bit of exercise. It was just one set of stairs after all. However, by thinking about stuff like this I notice I sometimes find myself checking the buttons other people press, and mentally weighing which person has the most ‘right’ of using the elevator. For example when I’m on the elevator with two other people, one who’s going to the 11th floor, and one for the 17th, I can’t help but notice I’m the most likely stairs candidate. I usually comfort myself with the fact that 8 is still pretty high up, and no one would really expect me to take the stairs, but I can’t help but be aware of the fact that I’m the one with the smallest (or I should say lowest) excuse to use the elevator. On the other hand, when I’m on the elevator with someone heading for the 4th and someone for the 6th, I can’t help but feel pretty good about myself. Surely I would take the stairs if I lived on the 4th. Right?

Well I’m beginning to see this ramble for what it is, which is: awkwarrrrd. Ok so it’s just this way of thinking that I have. No big deal.

Ah hell.

test test 1..2..3..

Just checking if I can also post pictures up here.



And wow look at that, it works. This is a bit of Zoutelande sky by the way.

I just had a really weird dream. It's probably due to the fact that I'm staying with my sister, and her house is still new to me. She had to work today so she was up at the break of dawn whereas I, having been fleetingly awake when she left, drifted in and out of sleep for the next couple of hours. There was also a pretty heavy thunderstorm going on outside, that might've helped.

So anyway, I dreamed that I was exactly where I was, namely, in the guest room in my sisters' house. Only in my dream I could hear a noise, and I was instantly aware of my sisters' flatscreen TV and the fact people might want to steal it. So in my dream I walk in to the hall and catch this like 12 year old boy climbing inside through the balcony door. He's pretty small so I'm thinking, I can totally handle this, so i get all up in his face and ask him what the hell he's doing there. He actually admits to wanting to steal stuff, and I escort him to the door to kick him out to the street, but for some reason the front door is suddenly HUGE and there are now two of them with a little foyer in between. Anyway, he doesn't want to go out so I have to drag him out into the street and just as a pass the front doors and realize that this might not have been the brightest idea, I turn around and some old lady is standing in my sisters' house and shuts the door in my face. Cue wake #1.

Ok so I'm relieved it was just a dream, nothing is really going on anyway, the house is prefectly safe. Then sometime later, I think I hear dogfeet clicking on the floor in the living room. I think, Rody? (thats our parents' dog) And I walk downstairs thinking my mom must be here if Rody is here too. Only when I get to the living room there are two Rody's and no mom at all. Somehow I don't even find it weird that there are two Rody's, which is a bit peculiar. But oh well, Cue wake #2.

Ok so I'm half awake, thinking hah! just another silly dream. Then awhile later I hear dog nails on the floor downstairs again. So I head downstairs again and walk into my mom who's halfway up the stairs cleaning.. something. Anyway I'm relieved, see I'm not crazy! she's actually here! And so is Rody, and my aunt. I plop down on the couch happily and start telling them about the weird dreams and yesterday's dinner which was both healthy AND really tasty, so I'm listing the ingredients when.. plop! Cue wake #3.

Now that was just weird honestly, I was even ready to tell them about my weird dream, within the weird dream! There was another variation of the dream in which my sister comes home early and I hear her slam the door and everything. Obviously that didn't happen either.

Anyway it's totally strange when you're dreaming about the actual location you are in and can't separate reality from fiction. Let's not do that again!

My 'favorite' housemate returned home from holiday today, and has strewn the hallway with his belongings, as is not uncommon in his behavior. I was annoyed by this and several other displays of his return, and I decided to make a list of things that annoy me most about Hugo (I've decided for privacy's sake to change his name).

So, here goes:

Hugo clogs the hallway with his stuff, which is forbidden by our housing corporation and could get us all kicked out.

Hugo leaves the light on in the shower.

Hugo leaves the light on in the toilet.

Hugo leaves other things in the toilet as well, like brown skit marks. And yes it's disgusting and we DO have a brush for this sort of thing which apparently just doesn't occur to him.

Hugo leaves the light on in the kitchen.

Hugo leaves his dirty dishes in the kitchen.

Hugo claims every common space area that is not clotted with debris for himself.

Whenever Hugo comes home from work and discovers the kitchen populated, he launches into an anecdote about his day, his work, or some ailment that has befallen him, regardless of what conversation this interrupts.

Hugo loves being the center of attention. (I bet you got that already from what I said before this)

Hugo likes to have discussions and must have the last word.

Hugo doesn't clean, period. He pays us to do it. (we are suckers for money)

Hugo hogs cutlery, plates and other public kitchen stuff in his room.

Hugo leaves the toilet seat up.

I can assure you that, as I suppose this list already indicates, Hugo is not an easy guy to live with.

Dear Blog,

This afternoon I was making a cheese sandwich for lunch when I cut myself using the cheese cutter, it bled like a bitch. Rakoo is staying here and he said I'm never to cut cheese again. I wanted to put a band-aid on it because it was bleeding so profusely but I couldn't find where I put them. My closet is just a teensy bit on the messy side. Anyway, halfway through my search it stopped bleeding so I just figured what the hell. I can already tell that I will probably find my band-aids at a time when nothing is bleeding and I absolutely don't need them at all. That's just how things go.

Rakoo wants me to mention that he was the one who heroically cut my cheese for me in the end.

In other news, it was very rainy today. It's supposed to be summer but so far the wheather hasn't acted like it. I'm still debating whether this is a good or a bad thing because on the positive side it is one of the first summers that it is not excruciatingly hot in here. And I got a tan in Zoutelande last week despite the wheather, so there.

Everything turned out better than expected.

Nostalgia

Dear Blog,

As you can see it has, again, been forever since I last wrote. This entry does not stem from the random impulse to once again revive my blog into something it has never really been. (which is, a blog that gets updated once a day, every day)

However, today I remembered there's something I wanted to write down so I wouldn't forget.

It's about Aion, and it's about the initial play time invested by Sepher, Baer, Demo, Fabi, Frenzied, Rakoo and myself. I know it's been a long time since we played Aion, and yeah on further inspection the game might not have been as awesome as we'd hoped, but there's something to be said for those first few months. To start with the character creation interface, which is still the best I've ever seen so far. Don't ask me how, when the options were limitless, I ended up with what probably most resembled an anime character. She was short, red-haired, and big-eyed. Seriously, they don't give you any idea of how short your character is going to look in comparison to the ingame characters. However, when you've spend at least an hour figuring out how your character should look, you have to defend her when other players point out her various faults. I should have just created a new one right there an then, when I was still level one. Alas I was too stubborn, and for the next 49 levels I looked upon Sepher's full-breasted blonde with envy. Rakoo's african-american amazon-chick wasn't bad either, she was, of course, better than mine, but she wasn't "xarvana" either. For as far as I can remember Demo was a blackhaired-dude, kindof skinny, Baer was a big bald-headed dude, not skinny at all, Frenzied was another blond beauty who somehow managed to outshine my redhead (even though I pointedly denied this) and Fabi, well, he played a female but this was perhaps the only one I wasn't particularly envious about. I think she had two braids. Fabi was picky like that, had go have his own thing. And sometimes, when we gave him hell for his char's looks, I suspect he too worked hard at pretending to like his char. Then again he watched anime, so maybe there was some truth to his beliefs. In this aspect Fabi might also have been the only one who liked my char at least kind of, what with the whole anime thing and all.

Anyway enough about the chars. The thing I remember most about Aion is the endless grinding. See, quests usually only got you halway, 3/4 if you were lucky. So the nights spend in the famous grinding area called the Kaiden Headquarters were plentiful. We were there hours on end, all night, evey night. We started playing Aion immediatly after release, so the people in our levelarea were mostly just as nerdy as us. Suffice it to say if you found a group to grind with, even your random member didn't have to leave after maybe 2 hours. No people, this was hardcore. This was a Korean game, and we were finding that out the hard way. I particularly remember one night in the Kaiden Headquarters, we were in a party of 6 as is normal in Aion, Sepher, Demo, Rakoo and I were there, and two randoms whos names I don't remember. What I do remember was that it must've been about 3.30 in the morning, and we were standing around regenerating when we decided to check how long our random mates were up for staying with us. The replies were positive. And then the one guy said something along the lines of "I just have to be afk for 1,5 hours, then I'm good to go". This was met with awkward silence on our part, mostly we were busy imagining what he had to go do in the middle of the night for one and a half hours. (the possibilities were endless) It turned out he had to deliver some newspapers, but would be back to join us in our seemingly neverending quest for xp.

I can positively say that this is among the highlights of the nerdisshness of my life. Not so much because he had to go deliver some papers, but because we'd actually be there waiting for him when he got back. Call it what you will but we sure had some fun with those Kaiden dudes.

Another one such memorable events in Aion happened some time after that. There was an epic quest in Aion, that rewarded the player with a awesome weapon, and in Aion epic REALLY means epic. The quest took forever, had about a million steps, and it was among the final and most difficult steps of this quest that this story takes place. Demo, Rakoo, myself and three randoms were in a party, on our way to the final step of beforementioned epic quest. For this quest, you had to travel through a rift into enemy territory, fight your way through an elite-area to one of their instances and the defeat the boss in said instance. These rifts only spawned once every few hours or so, and you had to have the exact correct one to get to the instance. When we hear the rift was there, we quickly partied up and went on our way. This was a journey of epic proportions. (befitting the quest) Remember folks, this was when Aion was brand new, and elite mobs were ELITE. Needless to say we had some very close calls. When we finally made it to the instance we were pretty happy with ourselves, and pretty tired of the outside snowy-scenery, so inside we went. Which is where the real fun started. Don't remember how often we had to run outside because someone added the whole room instead of a few mobs, but there was some progress. It was, I think, during one of those "oh shit the whole room added let's get out of here"-pulls that one of our randoms (thankfully not the healer) died. Now, dying isn't exactly the end of the world when you have a priest along who can revive the unfortunate player. However, this player wasn't just unfortunate, he was also stupid. He pressed the release button which pretty much brought him back to life on the other side of the rift, with no way for him to get back to us since the rift we used had disappeared. Though not without lack of trying on his part, he found another rift and wandered though enemy territory the rest of the evening. Stayed in ventrilo with us too, I think we all felt kind of bad for him. We did finish the instance without him though. I think we only had respawn once. It was the ultimate hard-work-pays-off moment in aion, we all got an awesome weapon for our trouble, felt kind of invincible afterwards i guess (at least i did). Totally awkward for random guy #2 though, since he went through more trouble than anyone and didn't get any reward. Such is the nature of the game I guess. You snooze you lose.

It's memories like this that make me miss gaming. It's why Rakoo and I are currently looking for a new mmorpg to try out, I mean even if it sucks, in the beginning everything is new, nothing is nerfed, and exploring new stuff with a party of friends is just about the most fun you'll ever get in an mmorpg, because pretty soon nothing's gonna be new anymore, just look at WoW. In the beginning everything was better. Blizzard gets this in a way that they keep adding new content, they just kind of forget that the items you achieve while conquering new stuff are half the fun, and if they keep making your acquirements useless by introducing better stuff that easier to get (basically nullifying your achievement) the game gets old. Fast.

Anyway, I hope there's some moments like the ones I've described in my future, it would have to be my near future because somehow the older I get the more embarrassed about gaming I become. Somehow gaming isn't that cool when you're 35. (says the girl who's dad plays WoW)

On the other hand, it shouldn't matter all that much how old I am, as long as we have fun together and it's something I can look back on years later and smile about. However cheesy that may sound.