text: What Avatar Should I Be?
  
  Forming my identity with video game morality tests. And how that led to my first kiss with a Dragon in a Walmart parking lot.
  
  Knowing yourself is life's eternal homework. ( Another coffee mug slogan!) We have to dig and experiment and figure out who the hell we are from birth to death, which is super inconvenient, right? And embarrassing. Because as teenagers we do all that soul-searching through our clothing choices. Which we later have photographic evidence of for shaming purposes. Hippie, sporty, goth, I have an adorable sampling of all my more mortifying phases.
  
  That "mom jeans" picture calls for a postview eye bleaching, huh?
  
  Because I was homeschooled, there are huge holes in my identity that I constantly have to trowel over. Answers to basic, "truth or dare" questions like:
  
  ▪ If you could trade places with one person for a day, who would it be? (I guess Beyoncé because... amazing hair reasons?)
  
  ▪ If society broke down, what store would you loot first? (A drug store for tampons? Sorry, dudes, for mentioning tampons in the book.)
  
  ▪ What kind of tattoo would you get? (Um... a hummingbird-fairy-dragon creature? Legolas on my right ass cheek? I HAVE NO IDEA, STOP PRESSURING ME!)
  
  I AM covered in the "What superpower would you wish for?" area. I've been asked that question a million times, because, you know, the nerd thing. I would want to be able to speak all languages. I don't even know ONE other language outside of key menu items like "tamale" and "fondue," but whenever I hear a tourist who can't speak English struggling to get directions, I dream of being able to step in, no matter what the language, but especially German since it's emphatic, and fix the problem. Then I accept their thanks with a wave of the hand. "Es ist nicht, mein freunde!" In my imagination, I meet a lot of amazing people this way, especially heiresses of castles whom I visit in Europe the following year, anointed as "The American who saved my vacation last summer."
  
  Moving on.
  
  As I grew up, I was bothered more and more by the bigger picture of "Who am I?" Science didn't seem to have much guidance except for one section about personality disorders in my dad's college psychology textbook. And those were a disappointment, because I didn't seem psychotic enough to qualify for any of them. So around the wise old age of twelve, I decided that fortune-telling was the key to learning about who I was. The obsession started with a Teen Beat magazine personality quiz, "What perfume are you?" (fruity, BTW, no surprise) and rolled onward from there.
  
  I studied graphology, the art of handwriting analysis, which confirmed that I was an introvert and inspired me to start slanting my words to the right instead of the left. (According to the book, left was the mark of a serial killer.) Numerology, where the letters in your name add up into a single number, told me that I was a "1," which gave me the great excuse to go around saying, "I'm a number one!" I liked that subject a lot. And later, the lost art of phrenology told me that one of my skull bumps was linked to an excess of philobrutism (fondness for pets), which is totally true. My favorite movie is Babe, and if you even hum the theme song to it, I WILL start crying. One time I was introduced to James Cromwell, who played a gruff farmer in the movie, and I burst into tears when I touched his hand. Because it was so big and warm and he DANCED FOR HIS PIG.
  
  But out of all the esoteric techniques I played around with, my favorite ended up being Western astrology. Because I loved space. At the time, my TV crush was Commander William T. Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He traveled the stars, I was studying them, those things seemed to add up to, "FATE CALLING! DISCOVER WHO YOU ARE SO WE CAN TRAVEL THE GALAXIES TOGETHER, BELOVED ENSIGN!"
  
  At first I was disappointed that I'm a Cancer, and my birthstone is the pearl. I mean, one's a deadly disease, the other is a gem for grandmas. I wanted to be born in October, because opals are the prettiest, but what could I do? My parents did the deed in September. Hello, unfashionable June baby. Aside from those problems, though, everything else was spot-on. My sign said I was a homebody. Check. I was sensitive. Sobbing double check. My Venus was in Taurus, so I would be a constant lover, which I already knew, because I'd read Hawthorne. I understood what happened to ladies with loose garters.
  
  From start to finish, the astrology thing was so convincing that I went ahead and let the rules of Cancerdom become the rules of my life. I started doing all the chores for the cats and dogs because I was a "nurturer." Whenever I got into a fight with my brother, I'd scream, "I can't help it! You crossed into my COMFORT ZONE!" Of all the recommended Cancerian jobs, I settled on "antique dealer," and started collecting books on pottery patterns from the 1920s in order to get a head start on my future career.
  
  "Mom, for Christmas I want this Roseville calla lily vase. The pattern is just MARVELOUS."
  
  I yearned to spread my new cosmic knowledge to other people in my life. Which... weren't many. My only option beyond my brother (who was SO Leo) were the girls I knew in ballet class. We'd exchanged words while waiting to do piqué turns across the floor a few times, so we were pretty much besties. I brought my astrology books with me to my next lesson and, in between tap class and pointe class, tried to transform a few fellow young lives.
  
  "Heather, you're a Libra, so your struggle will mostly be with vanity and validating yourself outside your looks."
  
  "Stop saying you'll never be able to do three pirouettes, Jackie! You're an air sign; it's totally gonna happen!"
  
  "Will you pass history class? Oooh, you're a Pisces with the moon in... ugh. Give it up, Tina."
  
  Turns out the girls loved having their own private psychic in the changing room. I convinced my mom to drop me off at class a half hour early for "stretching" and started consulting with all the dancers on parental problems, summer school plans, you name it. A lot of them brought in birthdays of boys they liked in order to see how their charts aligned. I'm pretty sure my advice led to a few de-virginizations. It was an awesome change from no one wanting to talk to the weird homeschooled girl! I'd finally found a way to relate to other kids. It was fulfilling. And made me popular. And eventually I got shut down.
  
  Miss Mary, my dance teacher, stopped me one day when I arrived. "Felicia, what are you carrying?"
  
  "Um, just a few books." There were fifteen stacked up to my chin. I'd just discovered Chinese astrology and I Ching and couldn't wait to tell Jennifer about the guy she crushed on, Simon. Sadly, his stubborn Tiger traits would always keep them apart.
  
  "Megan's mom doesn't like her learning about astrology. I'm going to have to ask you to stop talking about it with the girls."
  
  "But it's the science of the stars!"
  
  "She thinks it's Satanic. You gave her daughter a pentagram."
  
  "It's a natal chart, duh. You can't let ignorance trump science here, Miss Mary!"
  
  Nothing I said could persuade her. She was a Taurus. Once her mind was made up, it was over.
  
  I was forced to hang up my crystal ball, and eventually the girls stopped talking to me again. (And they probably made terrible life choices they could have avoided if they hadn't been deprived of my insight, thanks to Megan's mom.) I was upset but soon bounced back and was able to move on to another, more accessible place for friendship and identity exploration: the online world.
  
  [ Vidya Gamez! ]
  
  I don't need a psychologist to tell me that my love of role-playing games is linked to my childhood quest for self. Link number two: I like killing virtual monsters.
  
  We were always big on technology in my family. My dad studied to be an engineer before becoming a doctor, and he's the kind of dude who always had a PalmPilot in a large holster attached to his belt. (Now he has his Android phone in a large holster attached to his belt, but that's his life choice, and I will not mock it. To his face.)
  
  When I was about seven or eight, my grandfather gave us his secondhand "laptop," which was as big as a dining room table.
  
  I think it was meant to help my parents with their college courses, but generally my mom set the standard for us kids by playing video games on it. They were text-only, because the monitor didn't support graphics, so it was more like reading an interactive novel than anything. The gaming equivalent of liking weird foreign films with subtitles.
  
  My favorite one to watch her play was called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It came with a scratch-and-sniff sheet tied to various parts of the game, and I sniffed the pizza area until it disappeared, even though it smelled more like dog food than pepperoni. (If I did drugs, I would totally be a sniffer. Gasoline and Magic Markers, I gotta fight against getting my nose all up in there.) After watching my mom type "attack Tiffany with pipe" and having the game tell her back, "Tiffany yells, 'ow!'," I knew I was hooked on video games for life.
  
  As my brother and I grew up, we played any PC computer game we could trick our parents into buying us. It was the primary hobby we used to fill our many, MANY free hours between geisha lessons.
  
  "We need this program called Math Blaster to help us learn better, Mom. Oh, and those four other games under it, too. Don't look too close!"
  
  In an amazing stroke of Cancerian fate, right after the ballet class Satan-worshiping situation, I stumbled upon a video game series called Ultima. Besides pretty much being one of the seminal Role-Playing Game series of ALL TIME (don't argue with me about this, you're wrong), this is a video game that literally changed my life.
  
  What set this series apart from other indecipherably pixilated games of the early '90s was the way you created your character. At the beginning of the game, a fortune-teller asks you several multiple-choice questions like:
  
  "A girl is to be killed for stealing bread from a dying woman. What do you do?"
  
  A) Let them kill her; she deserved it.
  
  B) Demand that she be freed; her crime is understandable.
  
  C) Offer to take the punishment instead. She's hot.
  
  (Okay, that wasn't one of the real questions.)
  
  Depending on the way you answered, your avatar (the character you played; don't worry: I'll hold your hand through the nerd lingo) started the game differently. Your decisions influenced who you were in the world; your morals shaped what Virtues (like Honesty and Courage) you were aligned with. Let me simplify: As a kid, this video game SAW INTO MY SOUL. It defined me, then projected me into a world where I could be a virtual hero version of myself. I could walk around alone, without my mom warning me there were molesters waiting to kidnap me on every corner. I could go shopping and steal things and kill monsters! Oh, and I could name my avatar AFTER MYSELF! Screw astrology, I was in love!!!!!
  
  I played the games in the Ultima series for HOURS and HOURS a day, month after month. I decided it checked the box for many subjects in my homeschooled curriculum, like computer science, literature, and PE (for the eye-hand coordination). The only thing my mom ever said about it was, "I'm glad you're concentrating on something, kids!"
  
  I became completely immersed in the world, channeling my avatar's ruling Virtue of "Compassion" everywhere in the 16-bit realm. And deep down, all I wanted IN THE WORLD was to talk to other people about it. Discuss how bitchin' the graphics were. How awesome the lore was. And Holy crap, this game allows you to BAKE VIRTUAL BREAD! I NEEDED to share this joy with other humans! But the girls at ballet had no clue what a computer was (Megan's stupid mom probably thought that technology was the work of Satan), and my brother was... my brother. I mean, brothers are practically subhuman, right? No, I needed real live people who loved this Ultima game who were not living in my house with me! Where could I find them?!
  
  Hmmmm...
  
  [ Technology-ships ]
  
  BONG-BOOP-BOOP-BEEP-BEEP-BOOP-BOOP-BEEP <PAUSE>
  
  PLAP PLEEP PLWAAAAAAANG SCREEEEWAAAAAA
  
  KLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESHWAAAANG GLAW CEGLAW
  
  SSCHHEHEHHEHEHHHHHHHHHHWHHHHHHHHH
  
  <STATIC>
  
  Just approximating that sound in type makes me recall joy, like other kids getting excited over the creepy tinkle of an ice cream truck. In my childhood world, the sound of a modem dialing up to connect with another computer was the sound of freedom.
  
  I'm probably a member of the oldest generation that grew up with the idea that you can connect with other people using a computer. My grandfather worked for the military, where he headed the nuclear physics laboratory at the US Missile Command for twenty years, so he was probably sending groovy selfies back and forth with colleagues in the '70s. When the commercial internet started to emerge in the '80s, he encouraged my parents to get on the computers-talking-to-other-people train earlier than 99 percent of the rest of the population. And we thought we were soooo cool.
  
  There was only one commercial online company at the time, CompuServe, and it was not sophisticated, guys. It was the cave painting equivalent to Tumblr. I mean, you had to pay $10 an hour to use it. That's right, in ye olden internet days, kids, people had internet cafés in their own living rooms! But, for the times, CompuServe had it all. It offered news, messaging, and bulletin boards covering every subject you'd want to chat about in a glorious "only text" interface. Oh, and tons of racy ASCII porn.
  
  For that, and many reasons, it was a long time before my brother and I were allowed to log online by ourselves. We could only pop on and off to get quick hints about video game puzzles we were too lazy/stupid to figure out on our own. (Conservative usage of CompuServe was more affordable than using the 1-888 hint line, which we previously used to run up $400 phone bills. We got very good at hiding the mail from my father.) But eventually, when I was about fourteen, my family graduated online technologies to a newer online service called Prodigy. Which was revolutionary amazing because it charged $12.95 for unlimited use. In addition, it had REAL GRAPHICS. Like, eight whole colors.
  
  In 1994, this interface looked like virtual reality.
  
  Prodigy had online GAMES and interactive bulletin boards, and did I mention it was a flat rate, so my brother and I could use it as long as we wanted and not get in trouble? This was like Prometheus rolling into town, "Here, humans, check out this fire thing." It changed everything!
  
  As soon as I got access, I immediately went to the message boards to search the video game discussions and found a group called the Ultima Dragons. Browsing through the posts, I couldn't believe it. I had finally found a place where people totally knew what I was talking about when I wrote, "OMG ULTIMA IS THE BEST GAME OF ALL TIME SORRY FOR THE CAPS!" My dreams about finding a place to create true, meaningful friendships around my fake video game world had come true.
  
  And my mom didn't have to drive me anywhere!
  
  I joined the club and named myself Codex Dragon because everyone had a Name + Dragon theme going on, and a Codex was an object in the video game that represented the "book of infinite wisdom." Are some of you feeling like it's getting too geeky in here? You probably should have read the book blurb better, because I'm just getting STARTED.
  
  As a member of the Ultima Dragons, we didn't just post about the games, although a majority of the stuff was, "How do you defeat the stupid gargoyles at the Shrine of Humility because I keep dying!" We talked about movies we loved and books we read. The people who shared my love of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time fantasy book series immediately became my closest friends. They were the first people I'd ever met who'd read them, too. (Although I was the only one who had all the hardbacks in first edition and did a yearly reread. Impressed? Well, THEY were.)
  
  It might sound dorky, but the Ultima Dragons gave me my first environment where I could express my enthusiasms freely to my peers. Hell, for once I HAD peers. And I mined it for all it was worth. Socially, artistically. In all ways. Even... with poetry.
  
  Yes, I wrote poems dedicated to a video game—shut up with the judgment (although it's warranted). The following is a really special example. It's an ode to one of the fictional characters in Ultima video game. A jester. His name was Chuckles.
  
  Hand me the Pulitzer. Dozens more where that came from!
  
  There was also a separate message board called the "Drunken Stupor" where we'd post what I now understand to be "fanfic" set in a tavern (called the Drunken Stupor) about our Ultima Dragons characters. Meaning, ourselves. Example:
  
  Codex Dragon enters the tavern with a tough look on her face. Busting open the door with her high-heeled boot, then she strides over to the bar and then slams down her silver sword of Grandia. She looks at Tempest Dragon with torrid eyes, "You! I don't know whether to kill or kiss you." Tempest looks up. Like he wants her to do both.
  
  Looking back, there's an uncomfortable dose of S&M in the stories I wrote at fourteen. I attacked other Dragon members with swords and whips a lot, and Codex always wore sexy leather outfits with stiletto heels. The guys LOVED how creative I was! Their feedback on the stories made me discover that flirting was fun. So I proceeded to do it with a lot of people.
  
  Um, pretty much everyone.
  
  You gotta understand I had NO OTHER GUYS in my life! Sure, there were some boys in my dance classes and community theatre productions I acted in, but the other chorus members of Brigadoon didn't generally put their Ps in Vs. The guys online were into girls, and I had access to them. Do the teen math: I wanted all of them.
  
  We started sending pictures to each other (physically in the mail, yes), which either fueled or quashed the fire of awkward teen romance. I got a ton of positive feedback on my submission:
  
  This picture was originally taken for a JCPenney modeling competition. I was not a winner in the eyes of the department store, but the Dragons all thought I was a treasure.
  
  Yes, those are velvet high-tops.
  
  I got pictures back in exchange, and it was weird to put a face to an online personae. They never matched up the way I imagined. The asshole goth punk of the group turned out to be a Midwestern blond guy in a football outfit, straight out of Friday Night Lights. The friendliest of the group turned out to be a little person, which was a shock, but then cool, and no one brought it up again. Several of the other guys had really long stringy hacker hair, or were old, so I stopped flirting with them (kinda), and two standouts got my thumbs-up endorsement for continued romantic flirty times.
  
  On the one hand, Wolf Dragon's picture was a Sears portrait special, with the bokeh-blurred edges, and a splattering of pubescent facial hair, erratically spread, like a limp hair-gun had shot follicles at his face. But I liked his personality online, and he had kind eyes that overcame the velvet waterfall behind him. I was into him for his brain, mostly. And his cat named Poe.
  
  Camouflage Dragon, on the other hand, was, by Dragon standards, the hottie. He did have a significant unibrow, but he had eyes the color of a tiger's eye gem, ochre and deep, and he was into math, which I liked because my grandpa would approve. I gave myself permission to get a crush on him, too.
  
  I wasn't ready to commit to one boy or the other fully, I wanted to keep both in the romantic-type running, so we became an online trio, sending messages back and forth to one another in private email boxes. We also sent handwritten letters snail-mail style filled with song lyrics. Mostly Bangles and Aerosmith.
  
  "Camouflage, I like the idea we could all go to the same college. That would be so cool, but I don't wanna hope too hard. Like Steven Tyler says,
  
  You're callin' my name, but I gotta make clear
  
  I can't say, baby, where I'll be in a year."
  
  We would three-way call every other night. The guys each lived in different parts of New Jersey, and I remember thinking, Wow, their accents are so exotic. We mostly talked about the Ultima games, but we got into other things, too. Like... other video games. Our conversations were always fraught with veiled sexual innuendo. "What kind of armor do you hope your character wears in Ultima VIII, Codex? What kind of corsets?"
  
  My mom was cool with all of this, by the way. She had recently gotten more defensive about our socialization; maybe the state started checking in on us? Who knows? But she was extra aggressive in supporting my relationships with all my online Dragon friends, especially the romantic ones. After all, SHE first had sex at sixteen and other details I tried to black out after she shared them.
  
  The summer of my fifteenth birthday, my family had to move to Louisville. And because we were going in the general compass direction of New Jersey-ish-ness, Mom decided that it would be okay to take a trip and see as many of my Ultima Dragon friends as I wanted. Yes! MEET-UP TIME!
  
  I was so excited; I'd never been above the Mason-Dixon Line (yes, Southern people still had that as a THING) and I was going to meet face to face with my only friends in the world and perhaps a potential husband. My mom and brother would be along for the ride to cramp my style... but whatever. For my romantic teenaged heart, this was do-or-die time. I was gonna figure out which one of these guys I liked better if it KILLED ME!
  
  New Jersey is much farther north than you'd think if you're driving from Alabama in a two-door Acura hatchback with broken air conditioning. We arrived at Camouflage's house after a few days (for a real name, let's call him Tyler. Which was hard to remember in person anyway, to NOT call him Camouflage). And when we got there it was obvious he hadn't explained everything about the meet-up to his mom. Or... anything.
  
  We were shoved in the basement with the four other Dragons who showed up while Tyler got chewed out by his parents upstairs.
  
  *muffled yelling* "Weirdos!"
  
  "Mom!" *muffled yelling* "NOT weirdos!"
  
  That went on for a while. Meanwhile, we made the best of it downstairs and awkwardly tried to pin faces to Dragon usernames.
  
  There was Aeire, our club leader, with waist-length blond hair and a slacker vibe, who never took his sunglasses off, and his girlfriend, Mist Dragon, who looked like she should be into reading romance novels, not killing gargoyles. I don't think I ever got either of their real names, but they were nice and came from Ohio, which was also an exotic state to me. "You eat spaghetti with your chili? How interesting!"
  
  There were a few older dudes who I can't remember much of at all because my mom was kind of a cock block to us interacting. And thankfully, Wolf (fake real name Henry) had shown up from exotic EAST New Jersey for my inspection.
  
  He approached me, wearing that Sears portrait smile. "Hey!"
  
  "Hey! Wow, weird to meet you in person!"
  
  Insert awkward attempt at hug. Abandon.
  
  Insert awkward pause.
  
  And another.
  
  I sat down next to him on a slightly broken futon, and within twenty seconds I could feel the possibility of romance disappearing. Instant turn-off. A never-gonna-happen-let's-be-friends-forever switch flipped in my head. And it wasn't because of his looks (although his picture didn't translate BETTER in person), but there was just no chemistry there. He was someone I got along with and wanted to talk hours to on the phone. But have my virgin intercourse with? Nope.
  
  I don't think the attraction disappeared for him as instantaneously as it did for me, so I had to navigate the dance of trying to reframe our relationship as friends and not phone flirt mates before my other courtier, Tyler, got finished being yelled at upstairs by a very angry New Jersey woman. (By the way, her accent was NOT exotic.)
  
  "How's your cat doing?"
  
  "Good! I can't believe I'm seeing you in person. You're so prett..."
  
  "Look over there! A washer-dryer combo! Cool!"
  
  I tried to throw the conversation to the group as a whole, but at a certain point, the whole vibe in the basement got SUPER stilted. No one felt comfortable enough to share personal information. We'd followed a mad impulse to connect in person, and the experience was NOT equaling the anticipation we felt. I think we all had completely different ideas of one another in our heads. Also, a few of us were CHILDREN, and I don't think that sunk in over the computer monitors as well as it did in real life. We tried to circle safe topics like, "Can you believe what Periwinkle Dragon said about Feather Dragon on the forum last week..." but after that, everything trailed off into tense pauses. It was extremely uncomfortable.
  
  For once in my life, I can say, "Thank goodness my mom was there!" She has a talent for prompting inappropriate conversations with strangers. As soon as she took charge, we learned about people's divorces, sexual orientation, and we were just getting into drug use confessions and my yelling, "Mom!" really loud when Tyler came downstairs and suggested we "Go out for a walk and a bite to eat."
  
  Translation: His mom was booting the weirdos.
  
  The group moved down to the Jersey boardwalk, which is lovely and has excellent taffy, and we made a beeline for the video game arcade, where all the Dragons proceeded to play separately from each other for another two and a half hours, only stopping for a short break to get hot dogs. I spent most of my time with Camouflage (damnit, Tyler!) and tried to salvage the dream of finding my true love in New Jersey.
  
  And, try as I might, it just didn't work. Yes, he was smart and cute in person and clearly hadn't doctored his photos because there was still that unibrow, but the whole package was like seeing a Tiffany box from afar and being so psyched and then getting up close and realizing it's a pack of gum from the 99-cent store. There's an indefinable "something" you have with another person to get your reproductive organs all flame-y, and it just wasn't there with any of the Dragons. I'd had a big crush on Tyler before, but in retrospect, I think it was only because he gave good phone voice.
  
  Getting the romance question out of the way was a relief. Now I could actually have fun! Henry, Tyler, and I proceeded to beat the crap out of each other at Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. We had an awesome, platonic time together, and I was prepared to leave happy knowing I would still have two great friends online, and I could let my heart move on to other places.
  
  And then my mom jumped in.
  
  She had always been a BIG Tyler fan and decided to get her pompoms out.
  
  "Isn't he sweet? His mom's a bitch, but he's so cute."
  
  "He's okay, Mom. So is his mom." His mom wasn't okay—what little I saw of her reminded me of a character from The Godfather, but I didn't want to get judge-y.
  
  "You two look so good together, his eyes are pretty. You need to get away from the group. Go off alone together! I'll distract Henry."
  
  "What? No, I'm fine!"
  
  "We're leaving in the morning, Felicia. Go down to the beach with him alone!"
  
  "No! That's weird! Why?"
  
  "Felicia, you have to kiss him. This is your chance!"
  
  And then it became clear. Before we left New Jersey, my mom was determined to hook me up.
  
  For the record, I had never kissed a boy before, and she had to know this, since I'd been locked away like Rapunzel. Maybe it was because she drove seventeen hours and wanted some payoff, but she decided to jump in and grease the libido. In her "helpful" mind, I didn't know enough to interact with guys properly, and she was going to be my guide. Whether I liked it or not.
  
  At the end of the afternoon, all the other Dragons dispersed with the promise of "Let's meet up again!" (Except we never would.) Then my mom found an excuse to drive me and Tyler to a nearby Walmart.
  
  She dragged my brother inside, leaving me and Tyler alone in the car together, with the ulterior motive of giving us time to mash faces.
  
  "I'm going to get some snacks for the drive tomorrow. Ryon, you want Bugles?" My brother got out of the car and followed her without looking up from his Game Boy. I don't think he looked up from that thing for six years, to be honest.
  
  I made one last desperate attempt to escape. "We can go with you! Please!"
  
  "Nope. You two stay here and have fun!" As she left, my mom gave me her "You'd better do this, or I'm gonna pinch you really hard later" look through the open car window.
  
  Great. I had to go through with it.
  
  I remember very little of the buildup to my very first kiss. Tyler and I were in the backseat together, and it was hot. Anything we said to each other was white noise as I bathed in my own pubescent sweat and dread. When I think back on it, maybe Tyler thought I was nervous because I was excited to kiss him? For the record, I was not. I just wanted to check the box and get it over with so my family could come back with Bugles.
  
  Finally, I made a move in. He obliged. We met in the middle and...
  
  It was not good. The feeling of "Ew" is still vivid now. I remember thinking, Lips are pretty gross. In my defense, I am a REALLY careful eater, and his lips were wetter than lips should EVER be when you're out of a pool.
  
  Grody. We retracted, underwhelmed. A few beats of silent horror spanned the back of the 1990 two-door Acura.
  
  "So... um, are you gonna write any more Ultima game poetry soon? I think you should do one on the magical explosion at Scara Brae."
  
  "Really? I do love that quest line!"
  
  We talked about the finer points of the game inventory management system until my family returned. Whew, significant sexual life experience, over!
  
  My mom gave me a pointed look in the rearview as she got in the car. I responded by putting my sticky, sweaty hand on Tyler's sticky, sweaty hand and smiled. She nodded and we drove off.
  
  And that is why, to this day, I hate New Jersey.
  
  Even though it wasn't great, that trip didn't cause me to break off my relationship with the Ultima Dragons group. The breakup happened a few months afterward when Prodigy stopped unlimited monthly usage and started charging by the hour. Dumb jerks. The group dispersed, but a few friendships persevered. I kept up my platonic three-way with Tyler and Henry, and Henry actually ended up going to college at University of Texas with me the following year and became one of my best friends. Tyler drifted away because his mom wouldn't let him join us; she thought we were freaks. She was probably right.
  
  I know the story of my Dragon-hood may sound a little sad and weird and super geeky, but (kiss story aside) for a girl who was lonely and desperate for friends, that group of people was the most important social thing to happen to me growing up. I can't imagine being as confident about my passion for geeky things today without that opportunity to connect with OTHER people who were saying, "Wow, I love those geeky things, too!"
  
  That early community taught me how wonderful it is to connect with like-minded people. No matter how lonely and isolated and starved for connection you are, there's always the possibility in the online world that you can find a place to be accepted, or discover a friendship that's started with the smallest of interests but could last a lifetime. Your qualification for finding a place to belong is enthusiasm and passion, and I think that's a beautiful thing.
  
  No one should feel lonely or embarrassed about liking something. Except for illegal sex picture stuff. And murder and dogfighting... I'll make a list. It'll be pretty long, now that I think about it. But you get the gist.
  
  Signed,
  
  Codex Dragon
  
  -==(UDIC)==-