So I am sitting here at 4 am on the morning after playing my first game of D & D in several years. I used to have so much fun playing with Isaac and company and it makes me really happy that I am doing it again. However, in the days leading up to playing some insecurities that I have had all my life, that I thought were mostly gone, cropped up again. Which is weird because lately I have been a lot more comfortable and open about embracing my "inner" nerd, but I still would not have told most people that I was going to spend my Sunday playing D & D. However, Jesse and Katt were both more than a little open about sharing that info with anyone and everyone, which made me twinge with discomfort each time.

Now the hardest part is going to be waiting until next Sunday to play again.

I really wish I read "better" books, most of what I read is pulp-ish fantasy or sci-fi. I primarily read the stuff because I can read it super fast and it is a decent form of entertainment. But when I read something like Bester, Mieville, Gavriel Kay, or even Carey to some extent I actually "feel" the story. I have been moved to cry by fantasy novels (and recently while watching the Two Towers I almost teared up) but I don't feel like I read enough books that could be called "good" fiction. But most pure fiction is not all that interesting to me unless there is a particularly strong archetypical character (like Burke from the Vachss novels).

So Tuesday marked the date of my first ever DJ night, basically everything about the night was in my hands. From the initial idea, to presenting it to the Grad, to promoting it, and finally to actually putting on the night itself. It was a fairly long process and at the end of the night I was fairly exhausted. Initially I was not that pleased with how the night went, I wished more people had shown up and that my DJ-ing skills had been a bit better. But as time has gone on, and I have not only talked to the Grad again, but also talked to many of the people who did come out, I have realized that while the night may not have been an unqualified success, it was successful.

The Grad has tentatively agreed to host my night (which I call Rock It!, after the Herbie Hancock song) again on December 4th. There are several things that I am going to change, the most important being that I do not want to have to DJ the entire night by myself. Initially I wanted a DJ partner, but now I am leaning more towards simply having someone who can give me a breather every once and a while. I think that if I had come into the entire endevour with a partner it would be a different story, but at this point I kinda feel like it is my creation and I do not want to give up control. Plus, I have not really been able to think of someone that I could enter into that kind of partnership with. Jesse is probably the most likely, but he has even less experience DJ-ing than I do, although he is much more musically inclined. Either way, we will see if I get the go-ahead from the Grad, which looks very likely, and then we will see how the next night plays out.

I think the biggest thing that I learned from promoting the first night is that most people are unreliable. I thought that about 100-150 people would show up because it seemed like I had confirmed that many were going to be there, but in reality only about half that number came out. I would like to think that I am more reliable than most when it comes to these things, if I am not going to make it out to an event then I usually tell the person that I won't be there. If certain people hadn't told me that they were going to come out on Tuesday then my expectations for the night would not have been so high, and I probably would have felt better when the night was over.

This has been a very weird week.