Origins Part 3: The Elephant in the Room

Yes, there's been an elephant in the room. Yes, I'm going to address it. And yes, sadly, it relates to my origin as a nerd girl.

After several years of Simming, it so happened that at that year's New Year's Eve party (it was about 2006-2007), my cousin (same guy who let me play his version of Sims 3. yeah, my family is pretty much awesome) brought his Wii over. We spent all night playing it, not even aware that midnight was fast approaching. I started to fall in love with that piece of plastic. And, several months later, I voice my desire to own one.

Unfortunatley, I timed my wish just as the huge Wii-Sales Rush hit. Wii's were like unicorns, rare, and gone the next second. You couldn't just walk into any store and buy one. You had to call ahead, know when the guys at GameStop were getting their next shippment in. It was like playing Whack-A-Mole. Only less fun and more time inducing. Time wasted? I don't know. It took a while, let's just say that.

Finally, in May, my dad announced he was off to go Wii-hunting. I wished him good luck, though seriously doubted he would get one. After all, all our other attempts hadn't gone well. Why should this one work out for us?

After a long day of school, expecting to come home to disappointment, my parents handed me a card with a handwritten note in it. It was praising me for doing well at my piano recital. At the end of it was "Wii think you need to clean your room though." There was about a second of the misspelled "we" registering in my head before I was up the stairs and ripping the covers off my bed. There, resting against my pillow, gleaming white in its glossy cardboard box, was my very own Wii. I screamed with joy, and my dad and I went to setting it up (My mom was technologically inept). I spent the next several hours in Wii Sports joy, returning to school with sore arms, which those who had not truly played Wii did not believe a video game could make your arms hurt.

During the set up, I was given the task of naming my Wii. I thought of B.P.E., short for Best Present Ever, except my brain wondered, "What if I forget what that stands for?" So I chose a similar theme, but going for PRES. And Pres has been sitting proudly attop the subwoofer ever since.

A few weeks later, I convinced my parents to buy me this game:

Now, this wasn't the first Zelda game I played (it was one of the handheld ones, Oracle of Seasons, I think), but it was the first one I managed to finish all on my own. I spent the entire summer playing this game. I have to confess: I totally cheated. Meaning, I found a guide, and followed all the instructions and didn't really solve the puzzles on my own. However, despite my cheating, something very strange happened to me.

Now, Link is pretty hot. No, seriously, have you seen him?! One sec.

*Girly sigh of adoration*
Those blue eyes, that blonde hair...that beautiful determined expression. Man, he is gorgeous! But I didn't start out that way. Instead, he was just a guy. A guy who had a horse, a fancy sword and sheild, and wore a funny green windsock hat. Oh, I failed to mention that Link went shirtless once.

Yeah, my intitial reaction was, "LINK! PUT YOUR SHIRT BACK ON YOUNG MAN!" And it still kinda is that way right about now. I'm more into Link's "GRRrrr" expressions. They look a little like this.

Mmm-hmm. :) That there face is part of what won me over. The rest of it was his compassion towards others. He was a big brother to all those who knew him. Nothing would stop him. If you so much as even threatened anyone he cared about, you better hope you have a fifty foot wall made of adimantium between you and him. Even then, he'd find a way to reverse engineer it. This is what won me over. By the end of the game, I was a full on fangirl of him. I wasn't expecting to fall in love with someone that didn't exist. I wasn't expecting him to occupy a good majority of my doodles. He became my hero.

So, my game collection slowly began to expand, as I slowly descended into the joys of gaming. But something changed in early December.

"They found a tumor."

My mother stood next to me, we were both at the kitchen sink. Only a few months before, she had begun flailing like a puppet uncontrollably. No one knew why. And none of us knew what was wrong. We had a double episode on Thanksgiving, a sign that something was really wrong. For a moment, I swallowed. Decided to be brave, be strong for her sake, I said to her, "We'll get through this. This is just a test." How very right and wrong I was.

 She had a brain tumor. Melanona, they told her, and a very unusual place for it to metasticize (that means create a tumor). On December 15, she went in for surgery. I held her phone in my pocket the whole day, receiving text updates from my dad. I felt alone. I felt out of control. My whole life, my whole future changed with those four words. I imagined my wedding day, without my mother; I imagined the birth of my first child, without my mother. College graduation, birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, her birthday: all without her. I stopped thinking about the future. There were too many what-if's, and what could have been's that I couldn't even begin to try to think about. It all meant the same thing: My mother might die.

My brother-in-law had brought over some Gamecube games to play on Thanksgiving. Seeing as everything just went to pieces, he had left them there, sitting in the grey bag by Pres. Despondant, alone, and needing something, anything, to distract me from my endless solitude and so I could seem like I was still strong and brave, I began to play Smash Bros. Melee. It was a perfect fit for me: I was in control, if I didn't like something, I just chucked it off the stage or sent it flying with a well-aimed kick. More importantly, cancer, or any of its other cousins, didn't exist in this universe. The only thing that mattered was winning against Bowser or Ganondorf.

My father wasn't pleased that I was burning his new projector lightbulb up with video games. I agreed, but he didn't realize how badly I needed this world. Writing, my other hobby, forced me to think. And thinking always lead back to Mom or cancer in some way. I needed a world where I didn't have to think. A world where I could smash problems into oblivion.

Well, I won't keep depressing you with my sob story about me and how video games ended up saving my life. I'll leave you with something that kept me going in my lonely sophomore year, when I had friends, but I didn't quite trust them with something as weighty as my mother probably going to die. So, I've addressed half the elephant in the room...you'll get the other half...next week, I guess?

And yes, that is Link with the awesome Triforce Slash. Also, this theme is FREAKIN' AWESOME! Wait, I need a Rainbow Dash smiley for that. /)^3^(\ (<<---"So Awesome!")