Second post?!

So wait, you're saying just titling each post with the number of posts I've made is a bad idea?! Huh, alright. I'll look into that.

Yesterday I mentioned that I have a number of questions regarding whether or not to start playing WoW again. To fully understand why I have reservations, we first need to take a trip through memory lane and go back to when WoW first was first released.

My sophomore year of college was pretty awesome. I joined the rugby team (I first played rugby my senior year in high school, the inaugural season at my school) and was a starter on the B-Side. The coach even told me that I would have a chance to compete for a starting position on the A-Side in the following season. Not only was rugby fun because I love sports, but it also helped me find a group of people that really made me feel like I belonged. This was something that I think I really needed at the time, because going from a relatively small high school (200 students in my class) to Virginia Tech (>20k students) was a hard adjustment. I went from being a big fish in a small pond to basically being a nobody. Suddenly I had people to go party with whenever I wanted, people to get food with, and people to just go outside and toss a rugby ball around with if I was bored. I spent the summer after my sophomore year training hard, determined to be in great shape.

And, because each story needs a love element, I also met a girl. I fell head over heels for her, despite the fact that she had a long term boyfriend that she'd been dating since she was in high school. Not to be deterred by this, we became friends and ... then one night, close to the end of the year, she told me that she had broken up with him. Success! We started dating almost immediately - for some reason the fact that she had just gotten out of a serious long term relationship didn't send up giant red warning flags at the time.

I had also just changed my major, thinking I wanted to do something in Biology rather than boring old Business, so over the summer I signed up to take some classes at a local college to catch up. My new girlfriend went to study abroad and I was working, taking classes at night, and fitting in workouts when I could. As you might have guessed from the previous paragraph, the girl got back from abroad and decided she wanted to be back with her old boyfriend. Heartbroken, I poured the rest of my summer into working out and reading about this fancy new game coming out called "World of Warcraft." For whatever reason, I can still picture myself sitting in my dad's basement (god, how cliche is that?!), eating dinner late at night after class/workout, and reading the forums about some of the small cool things you'd be able to do in this new game - you could actually click on benches and your character would sit! you could press a button and it would sheath/unsheath your weapons! zomg!!!

So as the summer came to an end, I was in the best shape of my life, and ready to go back to school. Our first rugby practice was on the second day of school. To drum up interest, we were practicing on a field that was right in the middle of campus, the Drillfield. We were doing some drill where you run through a human obstacle course of sorts, and as I was going through, I spun out of a tackle. Or at least, I tried to spin - part of my knee went and the other part didn't. An ambulance came and took me to the hospital (I've often wondered whether this was good or bad publicity) ... I had torn my MCL and PCL. I had surgery and was done for the year. I still went to some of the rugby get togethers, but I felt like an outsider. Plus, it was hard to drink on crutches!

It wasn't until the following summer that I realized I wasn't going to play rugby again. My knee has never been the same, it's still got some laxity. Knowing that I wasn't going to play rugby completed the "outsider" mentality that I had. Despite the fact that some friends on the team told me it didn't matter and I should still come around, I didn't. I had lost the group of people I had spent most of my time with, and I turned to WoW to fill that void.

I'm still not sure whether WoW sucked me in and caused me to withdraw from the rest of my life or if the rest of my life just sucked and I found solace in WoW. Either way, what followed was not pretty!

... and that seems like a great place to end today's very long, rambly post. If this were a tv series, that would've been a great cliffhanger had I not ruined it with this note about what a great cliffhanger it was!