Not a Scifi fan

Or at least not relatively. Last night I attended the San Diego Scifi meetup. For those not familier with meetup.com it is a site dedicated to organizing events where people with similar interests can meet. I had already accidentally happened upon an rpg meetup and Marc and I attended a D&D meetup as a spur of the moment thing.

Out of the three meetups the Scifi one had the most attendance and best support. However, it was directed toward literary scifi. I think, "no biggy," I read plenty of it in my time. However the books I read was tiny in comparison. This Scifi meetup everyone brought all the their old paperbacks and we lined them up so any book you wanted you just grabbed. I brought 5 or 6 books and walked out with one which I'm pretty sure I'll never read.

Most people had stacks of 5 to 12 books of stuff I never heard of. I realized that many of these people planned on grinding through all these books in a couple months. This blew me away as I average about 6 books a year. Considering that my reading interest has been leaning toward modern fiction and that the last few scifi books I've read havn't been that good I was overwhelmed.

I ended up sitting at a small table of 4 woman and 2 other guys. I just couldn't get into the conversation as most of the women seemed to be fantasy fans (and I really don't like fantasy). One guy took me aback by telling me he has been working 14 years on his bachelors. When talking about a book he said it is taking him a long time to read because it sucks. I couldn't figure it out because if a book sucks I stop reading. As a matter of fact most of the people at the table kept complaining about sucky books they had read, plus the sequals of said books. Now, I realize that 90% of everything is complete crap and when it comes to novels I only want to read that top 10%. As a result I had trouble understanding these peoples' desires to not only read bad fiction but bad fiction they didn't like. It was like they had to get their fix, good or bad they must pump their souls full of scifi. And this is where I couldn't relate. So, I like scifi, love some of it but I don't need it.

I did get to meet Alison Longsdale who was the organizer of the event and very nice and charismatic. I had originally saw her at the wierd Geek Concert in which she talked a little about the scifi meetup and gave me the idea to attend. What is even stranger is that apparently her x-boyfriend has decided to create another scifi meetup at the exact same time in spite of her. I then found out that I knew the x-boyfriend who was a guy a gamed with when I first moved to San Diego and belonged to a group I referred to "The Vampire Gaming Cult" due to how they operated.

I also got to see an old co-worker who worked with me at "Skytech Mortgage." A mortgage company that I worked at for 6 months when I first moved here.

So, now I have a serious delimma. I really have no interest in returning but I did get a gift certificate at Giovannis (the restaurant it is held at) because they took so long making my salad. And so are the complexities of life.