The Revenge of the Nerds never happened.

“Dude that knife shit is WEAK!!” – my friend shouted out as his health bar was slowly being eaten alive. “Pick ANY other team and I’ll wreck you”.

“Or you COULD just wreck this team, just a thought. What’s the matter, you mad that you’re losing to a scrub like me?”

Good old fashioned video game shit talk, there are few things in life that are better. Friends were laughing, drinking a combination of Mountain Dew and cheap vodka sold at $10 dollars a handle, passing the controller, and having a good time. In October of 2002, my friends were complaining about the newest woman in my life.

Yep, good old Spiral was about as much woman as I could get in 2002, but she was quite the catch. Finally, I was starting to beat some of my friends in Marvel vs Capcom 2, solely because of her.

The games and shit talk would go on well into the night  – noone had anywhere to go or anything to do the next day, because this is how we were spending our Friday nights. Welcome to college at one of the premier science and engineering schools in the USA – welcome to Georgia Tech.

As I looked around that night, there were about 7-10 of us in the lounge area of our dorm. Everyone was social, everyone seemed pretty well put together and fun – there were no “isolated lonely basement dwellers”. We were as diverse as you can get – black, white, Hispanic  Asian,  American and foreign born, religious and not… good at Marvel vs Capcom 2 or not.

But all of us had one thing in common – there were no women in our lives and no potential for one – because in this institution of higher learning with a 72% male to female ratio – such nights were not uncommon.

But the dream was always alive. “I can’t wait to get out man, we can make so much money after graduation, we’ll be total ballers”. “Yeah man, this shit is temporary”. “Dude the real world is gonna ROCK”.

…. Flash forward to 2013

My day is interrupted by a phone call from a buddy of mine, one of my college friends from ages ago. We shoot the shit on life, travel, gaming – the usual. He is still mad that on a game of Madden I changed his entire offensive line to scrubby backups while he wasn’t looking.

“I’ve been catching up with some of the guys from back in the day”, he said, “did you hear about Chang? He’s engaged. Good for him”. Chang was one of the later additions to that gaming crew. Good kid. So I went to facebook to check out what he was up to.

The girl was disappointing. Overweight, weird face, just not aesthetically pleasing. Maybe she had a sparkling personality, I don’t know. Just another name added to the list of people who claimed that one day they would be “ballers with all the ladies”, but didn’t live up to the hype.

I scroll through my facebook friends list, and add the filter – Georgia Tech – and this story plays out over and over again. A sexless dude with an overabundance of smarts and ambition is now the picture of the beta male – poorly dressed, holding his overweight girlfriend in front of the Eiffel Tower, or other “generic” vacation spots, seemingly a shadow of his former self. Noone became the entrepreneur they dreamed of becoming, but many are engineers doing pretty well for themselves (at least I hope so, engineering should pay well).

At least he looks happy. Or is he? At what point does someone’s mind snap? At what point does he stop chasing pretty girls and look at the girls that are close to him? Is it normal? Are they crazy for settling down? Or am I crazy for trying to live some sort of fantasy? I don’t consider my wants and needs to be terribly fantastic. But yet a few days ago, when I remarked on facebook how silly it is for a girl to have an Amazon wishlist on her okcupid profile, a friend of mine responded with the following:

“I don’t know why you’re so upset. It sounds like she’s capitalizing on a gender inequality the best way she can. You can either have equal female companions, or you can have gorgeous supermodels who deliver amazing blowjobs but demand fabulous spoiling in return. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.  I’ll begin taking your incredulous attitude seriously when you start dating normal women instead of mythical icons.”

According to her, I was chasing “mythical icons”. That can’t possibly be right. I’ve just always had a thing for, you know, ATTRACTIVE girls and I expect them to act like good people, that’s not mythical, is it? Well, according to her it is. And according to my old college buddies, it is too. Maybe I’m the crazy one.

“You need to find someone that loves you for you” – my old roomate blurred out. This was spontaneous and we were talking about TV shows before this. He was on drink #2, so alcohol was not to blame for his strange comment. Yes, the same roomate from this old blog post – who has now moved in with older, unattractive girlfriend. That Sunday he posted  a picture of a gigantic Paleo brunch – eggs, bacon and steak – prepared by his girlfriend. It looked absolutely delicious.  Maybe I’m the crazy one.

For some weird reason I stumbled onto some articles about Mark Zuckerberg. You know what – this kid is a billionaire and is a huge part of why today’s world is the way it is, and in 2002 he was also probably sitting like we were, playing video games and drinking shitty booze from plastic bottles.  Oh, he’s married? The world’s youngest self made billionaire is married? Pics please!

credit to Gawker

Oh…

Maybe I’m the crazy one after all.