Friends & Frustrations

So I was playing D&D yesterday, and I'm beginning to come to some conclusions I don't want to come to. Let me 'splain. This weekend was one of the best I've had since well before my dad died. Heidi and I acheived a new level in our relationship (I'll write more about that later), and when I was working at church the following morning, we were joking around about a guy with the initials of ASS not being able to have monogrammed underwear, especially on the front, because then it would be confusing. When I got to Richard's house, I was in the best and most playful and silliest mood I'd ever been when I met up with these people. It was wonderful. What followed was a series of personal attacks that I haven't experienced at such a level since early high school. I mean, seriously, there were attacks about my physical appearance (and I'm a fairly handsome man these days), my laugh (which usually brings me into a crowd, for some reason it tends to separate me from this crowd), a whole mess of really juvenile things. None of it was intended to bring me down, I'm sure, and perhaps the contrast from my emotional state when I got there magnified the whole deal, but it really ended up pissing me off. A lot. I stayed the whole evening, but didn't have much fun, and left tired and crappy. And it got me thinking. When I game with the Mensa crowd, I have fun, I feel energized, sometimes a little shagged out, but still alive and happy to have done so. When I game with my friend Jon, I leave wanting more. I have a lot of fun, we all are really happy to be together, we laugh together and it's great. I leave happy and excited. When I game with this crowd, I pretty much always leave tired and annoyed. I have to think about it a bit more, because these are all peole that I do like, ultimately, but I may end up leaving that group.