Promptapalooza No. 6: Tell us about your favourite quote

I’ve been very busy with work, as I expected. So the blog had to suffer. But here’s me trying one of the prompts of Promptapalooza. This one was posted by The Ancient Gaming Noob: “What is a favorite Quote/s, and tell us why“.

This is a quote that my best friend gave me on a keychain a few years ago and she also used it during her speech at my wedding:

Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

We actually met online for the first time back in 2002 or 2003 and this is where all of this (imagine me pointing at… erm… the internet?) comes in. I am most definitely not the only person on this planet who felt “out of place” as a child. Most of all with some family members, but also class mates and even friends. I did find real friends at school eventually. But when I discovered the internet for myself, this whole new world opened up! I suddenly found others who were just as “weird”, sometimes “weirder” as me – and the best part of it was: With all of us being “weird” (looking from the point of view of people I had known before that), we weren’t actually weird at all. We were just: Us. People who loved certain things, didn’t care about others – and it was alright.

Up until today, I am very careful about what and how much I tell colleagues or acquaintances and in some case also friends about my hobbies. Sure, I tell them that my husband and I are in a dance school and we go to dance classes at least once week or more often if we find the time. That we love salsa and Latin-American dances, but don’t care much about the waltz. I tell them that I love to cook, but don’t like baking that much because you never know if it’s any good until it’s served and on the table. Thanks to Netflix gaining popularity, I can actually say now that I prefer watching a film or a series with original voices and subtitles instead of the dubbed version without having to defend myself or listen to people go on about how we’re losing the German language with behaviours like this.

Sometimes, when I feel very brave, I tell people (with a more hushed voice) that I play video games. But I am very careful about who I tell these things. Since my job involves working with children, I can now more easily say that I also play video games from time to time (no, I wouldn’t say “every day”…), because it’s something positive as it can connect me to some of the children. When kids tell me about games they like playing, I can honestly say “Oh, I’ve heard about that one” or even “Oh, I tried that one before”.

But openly talking about my love for video games? How I prefer to play a game over watching a TV series on German TV any day? That’s ridiculous! And that’s where you and the quote come in again. I love blogging, because it reminds me every time I write something, receive a comment or read somebody else’s blog post that I am not the only one. There are many of us out there who like games, especially online games and who have found really good friends through gaming, just like I have!