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So, picking up where we left off yesterday: you might wonder why I'm bellyaching so much about my age. What does it matter if I'm no longer young enough to fully comprehend current trends in music and pop culture in general? Besides, there are certain advantages to getting older: while there are far more responsibilities, there's also a greater degree of freedom. And yet, the prospect of growing even older regularly fills me with dread and despair.

I've decided part of it has to do with this site. I arrived at Gaia because I'd found out about it from a friend of mine, who I met at the Silent Hill boards at GameFAQs and is now one of the main moderators for my forum, Melon Bread Time. She spent a lot of time in the GD in those days, and would occasionally point out some bizarre thread or other; and while the content of the threads mostly made me laugh, I liked the idea of customizable avatars. It fit in nicely with my ongoing attempt at creating an alternate identity, a persona distinct from my "real" life; so I signed up.

At first, I made a conscious attempt to appear to be female. I'd already established the Osakasan and Osakasan_Kasuga identities at GameFAQs and GameSpot; I pretended to be a 21-year-old woman named Lisa Miller, and my profile at the time corresponded to that identity. The Osakasan routine began as a joke-- I wanted to see how easily I could fool people at GameSpot (I succeeded so well, I became a member of a guild exclusively for female gamers). But it evolved into something else-- a means of escaping from my everyday life by adopting a different personality, and also a means of dealing with my fear that a 32-year-old guy (as I was at the time I joined) might be regarded with suspicion on a teen-dominated forum. I never had any illicit intentions when I came to Gaia; but I imagined that people might believe otherwise, so even when I stopped overtly pretending to be female, I refrained from mentioning my true gender.

But naturally, the routine couldn't last forever. I became disgusted with what Osakasan_Kasuga was becoming-- I'd become one of the meanest people in the Music forum, snapping at n00bs regularly and posting without any consideration for what other people thought. So I changed my name, overhauled my avatar, and decided I would make a serious effort to no longer be so vicious. It worked-- my friends list ballooned to its current insane proportions, I found myself accepted by the regulars in Free Gold, and I found myself enjoying the forums far more than I had when I was insulting people continually. (Now, I just insult them occasionally. xp ) And I also felt confident enough to drop the impersonation routine-- avatar excepted, of course-- and admit that I wasn't really a girl after all.

Strangely, this decision has become strongly linked to my anxiety about my age. I no longer worry that other Gaians might believe me to be a pervert, because I know the people I talk to regularly in the Music forum have no such misconceptions; but I do worry far more than I did in my former persona about how I'm seen, and what people think of me... and I often wonder if being older than most of the forum affects that perception. There are a couple of people I joke with about it regularly, but there are times when I'm genuinely concerned about it, because I fear it affects my ability to fully understand a lot of what's discussed here. Part of me enjoys playing the role of the cranky curmudgeon; but part of me realizes that grows tiresome after a while.

It also concerns me because, since I became Nobue Ito, I've become far more involved in this site than I had been previously. As Osakasan_Kasuga, I was fairly detached. I posted regularly in the Music forum and joined a couple guilds, but I remained aloof, rarely communicating much with anyone apart from my Melon Bread Time friends. In the past five months or so, that's all changed; and Gaia has become a larger part of my life than is probably healthy.

That leads me to the final reason for my age-related anxieties... but I'll save that for tomorrow's entry. After all, I've still got one line left from the chorus of "Lord Byron's Luggage" to use as a title, and that line describes what I plan to discuss in tomorrow's entry perfectly.