I am back from Farmageddon. I travelled to North Carolina on the 26th and got home yesterday. It was a grand time with so many games played. Even though the event was themed around the game Agricola I only played it five times over ten days of gaming - I don't even know how many different games I played but I had a great time in any case.
North Carolina gives me culture shock. The group at Farmageddon was pretty liberal and fit with my politics fine, but when driving around or wandering through airports I was often taken aback. Last time the thing that got me was the emphasis on the military and veneration of active duty military personnel, as well as people wearing clothes that made it clear they wanted to murder people. This time the strange thing was medical ads.
There are advertising pushes for hospitals here in Canada, but they are fundraising drives. I think this is stupid and we should just tax more to fund them properly rather than wasting money making ads, but I don't get to decide this stuff unfortunately. However, in the US the ads were different because they didn't seem to be about fundraising but rather about recruiting patients. The idea of medical institutions having ad teams to drum up business blows my fucking mind. How is this the way it works?
I knew that medicine in the US was privatized, of course. Sometimes though these things catch me unawares and I realize that I hadn't followed it to its logical conclusion. Why is healthcare in the US so ludicrously expensive? Lots of reasons... but one of them is patients are paying for advertising aiming to bring in more patients!
The free market is a useful tool, good at many things. Running hospitals is not one of them.
A consequence of travelling to visit my parents from the 21st to 25th and then travelling to play board games from the 26th to 6th is that my workout routine is completely disrupted. I can do pushups anywhere, and I can do pullups off of a beam at my parent's place, but that isn't a proper workout.
During Farmageddon I found another person who was really into the whole gym rat lifestyle, and we figured out how to get our workouts into days that are full of games. We set up challenges where we would do clap pushups based on game actions, which ended up with me doing something like 75 clap pushups over the course of a single game. I made a lot of time in between game turns into pushup time over the days I was away, but I really didn't know how my fitness level would hold up. Today I finally got back to the routine, and I found out that my constant pushup sets during gaming kept those muscles in good shape. All of my push exercises were no problem. The other exercises were pretty rough though. However, this means it shouldn't take long for me to get completely back into fighting shape.
I wonder how much me running away from the game table to crack out 25 pushups all the time affected other people. Were they just laughing at me? Annoyed at the interruption? Vaguely amused that I refused to take a week off? I don't know! I do know that I feel better when I get my muscles sore though, so I am going to keep on doing this as a way to cope with a lack of a proper gym.
As much as I enjoyed my time there though, I am glad to be home. I need my own space, my own kitchen, my own computer, and some quiet and silence. No matter how great people are, at some point I gotta run away. I certainly am not an extreme introvert, but I trend that way without a doubt.
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