What We Became

for L, L, B, C, and everybody else who was a part of those late-night imaginary worlds... even G

While I was in the shower this morning, my thoughts were roaming randomly as they are prone to do, and I was thinking about my AP students and the things they tend to find interesting.  Some of them are geekish the way I used to be when I was in high school and gravitate toward some of the cultish and traditional genres of Geekism:  Monty Python, Star Wars, Star Trek, RPGs, Doctor Who,  or the vast and shifting world of computer geekery.

I thought back over the long hours that crew of guys and I spent together playing D&D or what have you, and then a very odd revelation hit me.  We have, by and large, become the characters we played the most in those games.

L always played a wizard, and now he more or less is one.  The magic he wields is the code he writes, the specific computer languages that bend the electronic world to his will.  He continues to learn new forms of it, digging deeper into the mastery of it, just like his characters always did in the game.

L, his brother, was usually a ranger, keeper of the woodlands. Rangers knew all the lore of animal and plant and could move with ease in that environment and survive there.  He grew up to be a registered forester.  Once again, later in life the real world followed that character choice.

Then there's me.  I had several characters, but my favorite was a cleric.  Clerics had a type of magic, too, that came from their religious devotion to their canon.  I would say that I am devoted to the mysteries of my authors and my poets, that I find magic in their glorious words.  I am spending my life trying to share that beauty with those who come to my secluded place of study to learn it.  Yeah.  I pretty much lived up to my archetype choice, too.

There were other guys I knew that played these games with other groups that wound up "becoming their characters."  One of them was always a paladin.  He was first a Marine and is now a prison warden.  Check and check.  I am not sure about the others.  I've sort of lost touch with them.

Is what we were going to become somehow patterned into us that deeply from our youth?  Is it hiding in our subconscious just waiting to pop out?  I had NO plans to be a teacher at that time. In fact, I was actively opposed to the idea.  I'm not sure about the others.  It's a curiosity to me to think that we were somehow exploring our future selves through those rolling dice and THACOs.  I think that we have all become very good at what we are, and I think that, unavoidable frustrations of our jobs aside, we all enjoy what we do as well.  Perhaps those little previews we got, those excursions in imagination, were somehow tied to that success after all.