u/glootz2bootz

Last week I went to Vegas with my girlfriend. We played blackjack and she briefly “taught” me how to play. However she left out the part that the Jack, Queen, and King cards all equal 10. I “played” blackjack for nearly an hour and didn’t lose any money by the end of it, thinking I did well for my first time.

When we were with our friends last night, my girlfriend mentioned how blackjack is a strategy game. I said no not really because you never know what card the dealer is going to pull. She said some people learn to count cards if they are good enough. I said well I can’t even do the card math quick enough to figure out how many I had on the table each round. I said, loudly, to everyone, “I kept trying to think to myself, okay Jack is 12, Queen is 13??? King is 14??” Making a light joke, I thought, about my lack of math skills.

Everyone got silent. My girlfriend said “They all equal 10.” I said “what? Why didn’t you tell me this?” She said “i thought everyone knew that from when they were kids” and proceeded to ask every single person when they learned that. One learned it from Fallout New Vegas (released in 2010, and this person is my age so they were 12 when they learned this fact) and another person said they played blackjack growing up.

My partner insisted “every card game is like that” and I said… “not solitaire, I play solitaire… not go fish, I played that as a kid…”

And nobody said anything about it the rest of the night and I got super silent and weird.

WILL THIS EVER END???

Does anyone else sometimes feel like they don’t fit in with their typical same-age peers due to being schooled from reading and learning from older books, watching old movies on VHS instead of current movies, and generally being sheltered from trends among kids due to lack of socialization?

Born in 1998, went to private Christian preschool aged 2-4, homeschooled from kindergarten through 8th grade, and went to a small charter high school (uniforms) for high school from 2012-2015.

I feel like I missed out on a huge part of cultural development with my peers from age 5-14. And I feel like since I grew up watching more older reruns and vhs tapes instead of what was on tv at the time, I don’t relate to any of them. Instead I feel more connected socially to people a few years older than me.