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Sunday, October 26, 2003

nothing is as gray as it was yesterday

This is so bizarre. LT and I have been giving ourselves severe cases of joystick-related carpal tunnel syndrome, attempting to master this Star Wars Starfighter game I bought at Wal-Mart on Friday. (note: he is already better at it than I am, even though I have played it for more total time. This means I am a grownup now, for real, right?). Anyway. The idea of this game is that you drive through these scenes and shoot at things and try not to get killed. The first mission is a training mission, and all of you video gamer types are going to laugh yourselves silly when I tell you that it is REALLY HARD on the easy level and I'm really proud of myself for making it through about four of maybe six stages in forty minutes when you're supposed to complete the whole mission in four minutes. This mission involves flying this little yellow starfighter thingie (like Anakin uses to destroy the control ship in Episode 1, my resident Star Wars aficiando is telling me) through this ravine and shooting these mines and stuff. It makes me seasick when I first start playing it. But the weirdest part is (remember up there I said this was bizarre) is that after I've been playing it, it makes me seasick to stop. Like getting sea legs. This screen is only just now starting to slow down on its pitching and yawing, and I have the strange sensation that really I'm looking at this upside down somehow, even though plainly I am not.


Remember when River Raid -- for the Atari 800, not the 2600 or whatever that one was with the huge cartridges -- had really cool graphics? And Miner 2049er, how I loved that game. (now the screen seems sideways. I have to stop myself from tilting my head to make it straight). And Zaxxon. These really hokey 2-d graphics that we thought were just Top Of The Line. We who had 800's looked down on those of our friends and cousins who had the bulkier cartridges and the funkier graphics. And now those are antique video games. You can download them with ROMs (which basically make your PC run like an Atari, or something) for your PC (not that I would break the law like that) and the whole darn thing -- ROMs, a zillion games, whatever else you need -- takes up like 60K on your hard drive. That's how fancy and top-of-the-line they are. Not that I would know this personally, of course. I wonder how long it will be before we will be laughing because we thought this two-week-old 2.7GHz-512M-RAM-120G-hard-drive machine was pretty snazzy. Probably not very long at all.


Today has been a better day than yesterday. I still have a lot on my mind but it doesn't weigh me down as much as it did. We came home from church and just kind of relaxed, although I did some housework first, to alleviate guilt. Except now, you can't tell I did any at all. Children see a blank space of hardwood floor and think, FANTASTIC! More space to play Legos/put together a huge floor puzzle/play with my dollies/get out my dollhouse! And lazy indulgent single-Mom-for-the-week that I am, I do not keep on them about having Only One Thing Out At A Time, so as a reward I get to put it all away after they go to bed. But oh well, it's a cheerful happy mess and it's not as hard to put away as it looks. See how much more myself I am feeling? already finding the happy side of a mess in my living room. By tomorrow I'll be waxing rhapsodic about how my little baby girl has grown into this 4-year-old with a horsie dress and a sweater and Mary Janes and a single ponytail in the back, carrying her little Bible out to the car for church. Or hey, maybe I'll do that now. What the heck.

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