Anyone that follows my blog on a regular basis knows that while I mention gaming and occasionally celebrate triumphs or talk about something exciting coming up that my blog is not anywhere near entirely about gaming. In fact … it rarely is … the title is just a part, a small piece, of who I am …
For the sake of not having to edit this each year, with a depressingly growing number, I will just say that I was born in 1978, graduated from high school in 1996 … some days I feel very young, some days I feel very old … but usually I feel just about right. I am, at this point in my life, first and foremost a mother, with two amazing girls born in 2001 and 2003 and finally a son in all his male wonder born in 2005 … I’m not sure yet if I’m done having kids, but as the three I have get older every year, the thought of going back to 2am feedings and diapers starts to make less and less sense. I would say mother is by far my primary role at this point in my life.Over the last 30+ years of my life I have filled the roles of daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin, friend, best friend, confidant, girlfriend, lover, fiancé, wife, mother, co-worker, boss, and a million other titles. I have tried to fill each role 
in my life to the best of my ability and sometimes I fail, I am after all, only human. I divorced my children’s father after eight years of marriage putting me firmly in my place after being horribly judgmental of those who were divorced, but I will tell you in my case that I do not in any way, shape or form think the divorce was a mistake. I am now back in the role of girlfriend, something that I also am not always perfect at being, despite my best efforts.
in my life to the best of my ability and sometimes I fail, I am after all, only human. I divorced my children’s father after eight years of marriage putting me firmly in my place after being horribly judgmental of those who were divorced, but I will tell you in my case that I do not in any way, shape or form think the divorce was a mistake. I am now back in the role of girlfriend, something that I also am not always perfect at being, despite my best efforts.In short, I am human, I make mistakes, I curse, I can be mad, I can be sad, I can be giddy, I am not the picture of perfection, nor do I ever want to be … imperfection is genius … imperfection is creative … imperfection is what allows us to be vulnerable …. vulnerability allows us to love and be loved … and to love and be loved … is to be human …
The Girl Behind the Cats …
I also must admit that I am a borderline crazy cat lady … I have six cats at present moment … four of which I’ve acquired over the last year and a half … I have no plans on having anymore … but they are well taken care of, I’m not a hoarder and there seems to only really be one of them that dislikes the fact that the rest of them are here … I also have one sweet as hell golden lab that currently lives with my boyfriend due to my circumstances … 
The Girl Behind the Game … Being a female gamer, in any form that involves socializing with the opposite sex, whether they’re sitting in the same room and playing on the same TV as you or sitting across the country or world playing XBox Live or World of Warcraft (WoW) with you … brings about some interesting experiences … I have experienced sexism on many levels. I have been talked to in crass, amazingly demeaning ways, I have been made to feel like less of a player just because I’m a girl, I've been hit on more times than I can tell you … BUT … I have had good experiences … you’ll find that many guys are willing to go out of their way to help you with things they wouldn’t necessarily help another guy with … in WoW they give you free things … sometimes they’re not as hard on you as they would be on their male counterparts in large raids …
What I’ve found is interesting beyond all that, is that women are not kind to each other in online gaming … there is a “queen bee” mentality that goes through guilds, through raiding groups, through the game … although most of the drama in the guilds/raiding groups I’ve been involved with has been started by men … women can plain and simple be bitches … one of my best girl friends that I met while playing Halo sent me a message after a match, and I will never forget what she said … “I added you to my friends list, we should play sometime, you’re one of the few girls I’ve played with on here that didn’t annoy the hell out of me” … there is so much truth in that statement … many girls are there to flirt … others just make fools of themselves trying to overcompensate for I don’t know what … and then there are the others … the group I would put myself in … the group that is there because we like to play a game ….
These experiences, in the gaming world, have helped to shape who I am as well …
As far as straight gaming, I have been a gamer long enough to have competed nationally in a Nintendo competition in the third grade … starting with Mario, Rad Racer and Duck Hunt … moving on to more complex games as consoles became more complex … I still enjoy the basic Mario or Metroid … the simple games like Tetris and Bejewled can still get me playing for hours … my boyfriend introduced me to PC games … starting with Guild Wars and Battlefield (which I mostly just watched over his shoulder) … and finally the World of Warcraft …
I will admit I started playing because my boyfriend (who at the time was just a roommate) played so often he was always on the computer … so it was an “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” philosophy that got me into the game … (I am still a girl and very sympathetic & understanding of the "gamer widow" feeling) ... I started on his account for about 3 months … and then got my own account about a week after the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was released … my first 80 was a mage that took me about 2 months to level from 1-80 … my priest won my heart as I started playing her though and quickly became my “main” … at this point in time I have three 85s and many other toons I am leveling as well …
Games (of any kind) have rarely to never interfered with my real life and parenting … there have been a few times where I was running back and forth from the computer to the kitchen to make dinner, but not often … they are my social life, my means of escape from the everyday stresses of kids, work, school, whatever I have going on at the time …
I will admit I started playing because my boyfriend (who at the time was just a roommate) played so often he was always on the computer … so it was an “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” philosophy that got me into the game … (I am still a girl and very sympathetic & understanding of the "gamer widow" feeling) ... I started on his account for about 3 months … and then got my own account about a week after the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was released … my first 80 was a mage that took me about 2 months to level from 1-80 … my priest won my heart as I started playing her though and quickly became my “main” … at this point in time I have three 85s and many other toons I am leveling as well …Games (of any kind) have rarely to never interfered with my real life and parenting … there have been a few times where I was running back and forth from the computer to the kitchen to make dinner, but not often … they are my social life, my means of escape from the everyday stresses of kids, work, school, whatever I have going on at the time …
they are not my life …
they don’t define me …
