Car Trips

A lot of my life has been spent in a vehicle. Between hour long bus rides to school, driving all the way to Florida and back for a vacation, I know what it’s like to be stuck in a seat for way too long.

The most consistent time spent in a car, though, has probably been spent driving to and from my grandmother’s house. On average, I spend 96 hours a year in a car headed to Delaware. That’s a whopping 1,536 hours total for my life – and that’s not counting how often we went back to see her once we first moved to Pittsburgh, or trips to visit others in that area that were not my grandparents. So my parents were no stranger to finding ways to keep my sister and I entertained for six hours in one sitting.

The first way that comes to mind is window clings. My mom owed minivan after minivan for a very long time, and her last two had bucket seats in the middle row, so Annie and I each got our own window. We’d get window clings as gifts from our grandparents before we left for back home; the set I can remember most vividly was in ice cream set. There were cones, a dozen colors of ice cream, and toppings; Annie and I made ice cream treats that towered to the top of our windows. We’d pretend to open an ice cream shop and serve each other window cling ice cream.

Another was our sketch pads. We’d draw for hours quietly. One year we didn’t have window clings (they all got lost,) and so we drew notes for passing cars on our sketch pads, dabbed a little water from our water bottles onto the edges of the paper, and stuck them to our windows for the passing cars to admire.

We also had individual CD players, since it was before the age if iPods. We got them and sets of headphones for Christmas one year. Before each trip, we were allowed to go through my dad’s extensive CD library and pick out some favorites. Even back then, I was the one who wanted to listen to Martina McBride’s Christmas album in the middle of June; I can still see the jewel case art in my mind. We also fought over a Disney Classic CD, which had a bunch of music from the Disney movies on it. Eventually it got so bad that my parents got us a splitter, which was a really nifty device. You’d plug it into the headphone jack, and then plug up to three pairs of headphones into the little doodads that branched off from the headphone jack.

Eventually, my dad cracked and let us get a gameboy. We were only allowed to play it on car trips, and we had to switch off every half hour, and there came a point where my dad told us “no more game boy this trip, rest your eyes.” To top it off, this was the era before backlit hand held gaming, so if we were playing at night, we had to use an abysmally dim overhead light to try and see.

Around that time I started getting really, really good books for Christmas, as well as Borders gift cards. I got myself a two-headed book light and read almost the entire trip sometimes. My all-time favorites to bring on any car trip, regardless of how may times I’d read the books, were The Palace of Laughter and The Tale of Desperaux. (Which was a challenging read, for sure, there was a surprising amount of French in it for a grade school level book.)

Once I was in 7th grade and Annie was in 6th, we got laptops from our cyber school to do school work on, but they also served as our recreational devices. I’d ask to take mine with me in order to write, and the answer was sometimes yes. I’d end up playing pinball half the time, but it was still a nice way to pass the time. When it got too dark, I’d have to shut it off, because the light of my screen would cause a glare on the windshield.

We also would tell stories to each other; we had several games that revolved around stories. Our personal favorite was the one word story game, where we’d each say one word at a time to make a story. Most of the time, they made no sense, and were about Elizabeth the Screaming Pickle or Tomathy the Possessed Toilet. She and I will still, to this day, text each other about those stories.

Anymore, whenever we go back home, I’ll bring my spiffy new 3DS (my dad finally lets my sister and I buy whatever game systems we pleased as long as it’s with our own money,) a blanket, and some music. I haven’t taken a trip with Annie in some time; she and I have lived apart for almost three years now. Of course, now that my mom has moved out to Philly, she’ll be relying on my dad to get her a ride to Delaware for Christmas and Thanksgiving, so I’m very excited to take more car trips with her.

Especially if it involves Eliza or Tomathy again.

Fire Emblem

When I was in the fifth grade, my family and a family close to us took a week off of work and school to drive (yes, drive) down to Disney World. It was a 28 hour drive that we did straight through, and my dad decided it wasn’t fair for my sister and I to share one Gameboy with two games for that long. So, somewhere online, my dad found a Gameboy SP and a huge pack of games and gave them to us for the ride. We were under the understanding that we would have to give them back at the end of the trip; he told us that he got them from a friend, though looking back, I’m certain that he got a bundle off eBay and figured he’d sell it back later.

It was on this trip that I was introduced to turn-based board strategy, rather than Pokemon turn-based strategy. It actually started with a game that I could have sworn was called Castle Quire, but every place on the internet tells me no such game exists. Either way, I found it horribly hard, but despite that, it was wicked fun. It was like nothing I’d ever played before. I got stuck at one level where there was a character I could not control, she was my favorite character and my only healer, and no matter that I did, she died. So after hours on end of trying to get past this level (including restarting the game to redo any casualties I’d suffered) I gave up and looked to see what my sister was playing.

She’d just shut her game off to rest her eyes, so I asked what she’d been playing. She pulled the game out of her system and handed it to me. Fire Emblem. What a weird name for a game. I put it in my Gameboy and loaded it up, asked which file was hers, and started a new one on a different file.

It followed a blue (or was it green? Or black?) haired girl named Lyn, who addressed me directly. Which was weird. I’d put my own name in on a whim (which I never, ever did; I always made up a name much more interesting than mine,) so it was really weird to not only have a character talk to me directly, but to have her also use my real name. It made me feel… important. It was also a turn-based RPG, which at first, made me mad. How dare there be a different game like Castle Quire that wasn’t Castle Quire. Plus, it was 2D, and Castle Quire was 3D. Clearly, then, Castle Quire was superior.

It wasn’t until the ride home that I gave this weird game a chance. And I fell in love with it. I fell in love with Lyn, who quickly turned into a big-sister character for me. She was always asking me what I wanted to do, and even though I didn’t really have a say in what my response was, it still made me feel important. Of course, I only just barely got past Lyn’s storyline (there being three within the game) and had to quit before I got to the next characters, and it actually took me several trips to Delaware to get through Lyn’s story at all. But I loved it.

It would be years later until I would learn that there was more than one Fire Emblem game. However, the other Fire Emblem games that had been released for America (as many of them never got translated from Japanese into English) didn’t do the franchise service. They simply weren’t the Fire Emblem I’d fallen in love with all those years ago. So I played my game from time to time and tried to pretend the other games didn’t exist.

It was last year that my friend Owen got himself a 3DS with the new Fire Emblem on it.

To begin with, I was horribly against the 3DS. I figured it was just a marketing ploy on Nintendo’s part; I’d just bought a DSi not long before, because they’d said it’d be their last handheld in a while, so it was safe to upgrade. The 3D seemed gimmicky, and there didn’t seem to be any good titles for it.

But the DS Owen got… He got the Fire Emblem limited edition one. Which was beautiful. And upon hearing I’d played Rekka no Ken (the only Fire Emblem I’d liked to date,) he insisted I start a file on his new game, Fire Emblem: Awakening. I himmed and hawed and sighed and, finally, I decided to play.

I got to customize my character. This was new. As a tactition character in Rekka no Ken, you didn’t get a real sprite. So getting a full-size sprite, but also customizing it, was new, and welcome. Then, on top of that, I was a story member, rather than just a tactition that told units where to go. Don’t get me wrong, I was still a tactition. But all of the characters talked to me, and more than that, I really felt a part of the story. Plus, I could fight. I had a sword, and I had magic, so I wasn’t a useless character being toted around by the main character. And there were new mechanics that I loved; the new-and-improved support system, the paring up system, the way you got new units… I didn’t like the new thief, Gaius, as much as I’d liked the old thief, Matthew, which was a bit off-putting. But there was a whole myriad of characters and personalities, and very strong female characters. (I still hated the Pegasus knight as much as I’d hated the last one.) Plus, unlike the few other games on the 3DS I’d played in 3D on other people’s DS-es, the DS in this game enhanced the game, rather than feeling gimmicky or detracting from the gameplay.

I quickly fell in love with the game. So much, that whenever I went over to Owen’s house, I’d just barely sit down and start watching him and Brandon play whatever game that they were going to play before Owen would ask me why I wasn’t playing on his DS. The game went above and beyond my high expectations of what I thought Fire Emblem game should be.

For my high school graduation, my gift to myself was buying the same 3DS he had. Because I had to have it. I had to. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever gotten for myself.

Procrastination

One of the most used words in my life is probably “later.” I’ll write later, I’ll eat later, I’ll get up later, maybe later, you get my drift. It’s been an issue as long as I can remember it, and I congratulate any friends I have that have been able to put up with “I’ll see you another time” because I put off seeing them now.

However, if there is one thing I never, ever, ever procrastinate, it’s video games. Video games I play right here, right now, and often cause procrastination of other things.

Someone has found the chink in my armor.

There’s a site I’ve been introduced to called HabitRPG, which basically turns you into a cute little 8-bit character and rewards you for doing things you need to do or habits you want to break. You gain XP and gold for completing tasks, and lose HP if you don’t complete your dailies or do habits you want to break.

There’s also items to buy, pets, mounts, quests… it basically turns you into an RPG character, and makes it feel like you’re completing quests when you’re really just making sure you eat enough, or are writing a little bit each day, or trying to not bite your nails.

Basically, if you’re really good at not doing things you should do, 10/10 would recommend.

https://habitrpg.com/

 

Video Games

When I was very small, I remember begging my father, pleading, groveling, for a video game system. Specifically, a Gameboy or an N64. My father, however, strongly believed that video games rotted your brain and had no beneficial effect on children. Even the computer games he got for my sister and I were strictly educational; Jump-Start X Grades, Reader Rabbits, that sort of thing. And we were only allowed a certain amount of time playing these games per day. So the thought of his daughters owning a game system was unthinkable.

The only saving grace my sister and I had was the Eagle’s Nest. There’s a grocery store line around me called Giant Eagle, and they have this really nifty room for kids 3-10 to hang out and play while their parents shop. You can color, watch movies, play in the play-kitchen, build with blocks, and… play video games. At the time we started going to the Eagle’s Nest, there were two N64s, two Playstations, and a computer. Of course, as the video game industry evolved, systems were replaced by others; the Playstations became PS2s, and one of the N64s was replaced by a Gamecube. I spent hours on those machines. It was difficult at first, of course; how the heck was I supposed to look at the screen AND the buttons? And on the N64 controller, where was I supposed to put my hands? Hand-eye coordination was learned, problem solving skills were learned, and cunning was learned; you don’t just play Mario Party against your little sister without learning cunning, and how to “accidentally” screw her over. It just doesn’t happen.

One year, around Christmas time, Toys R Us sent us the big catalog of toys and games, like they did every year. Every year, my sister and I would go through with pens and put our initials next to the things we wanted. But this year, we had a plan. We had waited long enough for our own video games, and dammit, this year we were going to get them. We didn’t touch the Toys R Us catalog, or the KB Toys one, or the Oriental Trading one. There was one thing on our Christmas lists.

“Dear Santa, for Christmas, I would like a Game Boy Advance. Love Senna/Annie.”

We handed them to our mother to be sent out, who looked over it and handed it to our father, who read it several times over before looking at us.

“Girls,” he sighed, “why do you want a Game Boy?” (He made it two deliberate words, the way parents do when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Everyone knew it was supposed to be slurred together like one word. Gameboy.) My sister and I looked at each other. We’d known just saying “because it’s fun” wouldn’t cut it. We pulled out the list of reasons why we wanted one and began reading it off.

“We’ve played Rachel’s and it’s really fun. A lot of other kids play them, and even play together with games like Pokemon, and we feel very left out.” We rattled off many things, mostly bandwagon and pity reasons, but finally came to our coup de grâce; “it would give us something to do on the way to Delaware.”

Almost our entire family lived in Delaware; aunts, uncles, cousins, grand parents, great-grand parents, great-aunts, great-uncles, and all our family friends we called aunt or uncle. We never, ever took a plane. We drove. We drove six agonizing hours in mini van, trying to agree on who got what CD or tape we were going to listen to, who was going to read what book or color in which coloring book or use what set of window clings for their side of the car. For a kid, five minutes is a long time to wait when you can move about freely and distract yourself with other things. Six hours in an enclosed space, sitting still, fighting off vague car sickness, was agonizingly painful. And like any children, we made sure our parents knew it. After an hour or so, the air was punctuated with “I’m bored,” and “Are we there yet?” and “Can we listen to a different CD?” “No, this is my favorite one!” “But I’m tired of it!” and the like.

So the idea that we would take the Game Boy on car trips was an earth-shattering one. My father looked at the list again, and not another word was said about the topic.

Christmas came. There were many presents beneath the tree and in our stockings, and my sister and I looked at them, and we knew, we just knew, that none of them would be a Game Boy. We only asked for one thing, so that meant we shouldn’t get so many presents. Our parents came into the living room with the video camera, and we started unwrapping the way we did every year; taking turns, one at a time, opening our gifts. Stockings first, then the things under the tree. There was just one labeled “To Senna AND Annie, from Santa.” This was odd. We hardly ever shared presents. So we looked at each other.

“I wanna open it,” I said. I was the one who had pitched the idea to Annie of how to get the Game Boy in the first place, so if this was it, I thought I deserved to open it. She nodded, and I carefully peeled the wrapping paper off of the box.

And there it was.

It was a purple-clear GBA, nestled in a box that was not it’s original box, but I couldn’t care less. Neither could my sister. We had a typical kid-at-Christmas moment – we jumped up and down, yelling “A GAME BOY! A GAME BOY! A GAME BOY, IT’S A GAME BOY!” for about three minutes before my dad settled us down and had us sit back down and handed a very small package to my sister. What could it be? What could possibly be better than a Game Boy for Christmas?

A Pokemon game. Pokemon Crystal, to be exact.

We played that sucker like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t even care that we had to share a save file. We loved that game to bits. We were only allowed to play it on car trips, and because it wasn’t backlit we couldn’t play it at night, but it was enough.

Of course, it was enough until our friend Samantha got a DS, and introduced us to Nintendogs.

We were older by then, wiser, and our father was convinced that we only needed one game system, that was it, no more. We’d already tried to get a Gamecube and a Playstation. (My mom had even tried; she’d worked in the Eagle’s Nest for a while now, and when there was no kids there or someone wanted to play a 2 player game, she would be playing the PS2.) So we took matters into our own hands. We made an allowance every week if we did all of our chores, and we got money if we got straight As, and our grand parents would give us money for Christmas and birthdays. We looked up how much a DS cost: too much, not to mention we needed Nintendogs. So we saved. We saved for years. We saved until the DS Lite was almost old news. And then we struck.

“We want to buy a DS.”

My father at us from his office chair. He was the one who kept all of our money in a bank so it would gain interest, and he was the one who decided what it could be spent on. He was used to us asking to spend it on books or computer games, even the occasional Game Boy game, or things of the like.

“You don’t need another game system. Why is this one so different?”

We rattled off the reasons. Two screens. Backlit. Touch screen. Games weren’t being made for the Gameboy anymore. He wouldn’t ever let us get a real dog in a million years, and this would be the closest we would ever get. It was our money, we should decide what we wanted to do with it. (That statement didn’t go over well.) He didn’t give us an answer, rather, went back to work with a “we’ll see,” which in Adulteese meant “No.”

But we were adamant. We waited. We waited until we were in Delaware, ready to go home, and I spoke up and said “There’s no tax here in Delaware. Can we go buy a DS?” (My father, being the one who held all out money, made sure we understood how tax worked, and that Delaware had none. We bought most of our important things in Delaware.)

He heaved a sigh and turned around to look at us. He looked at us a long, long time, before finally speaking. “Yes. I suppose.” And we drove to the nearest GameStop and picked one up that was (miraculously) already charged, and two copies of Nintendogs, and we swapped off every half hour. We were the most content we’d ever been.

Every game system we bought was a struggle. Our uncle gave us a PS2 for Christmas one year, along with We Love Katamari, which my father was not happy about. Nonetheless he went out and bought us a memory stick so we could save our games. (Katamari, by the way, was the most bizarre but amazing game we’d ever played.) We pushed long and hard for a Wii, and though we were old enough to understand the value of our money, we still had to promise we’d always play standing up, and we’d get a good amount of exercise from playing before our dad would let us get one.

And this bothered me. While other kids were getting their consoles and games for Christmas or Easter or their birthdays or bat mitzvahs or anything like that, not only did I have to buy them myself, but I had to fight with my father over whether or not I was allowed to buy them with my own money. How was that fair? And when I did get them, I was kept on a strict timer of how much time I was allowed to spend playing games of any kind. Even over the summer, when there was very little to do, considering that my dad worked from home and most days couldn’t drive me to go see friends or take me to the library where I could read books I hadn’t read before. I ended up sitting in front of the old typewriter he’d gotten me so I could write without staring at a computer screen, plunking out one-page stories that I would inevitably throw away shortly after finishing.

The only system he didn’t put up a fight about while I still lived with him was my Xbox; by that time I was 16, and he’d given up entirely on the idea of regulating how much we spent on what. Was he happy that my first three games, besides Kinect Adventures, which came with the system, were first-person shooters? No. (Though I wouldn’t really categorize Portal 2 as a shooter game.) But he let me buy them, he let me play them as long as I wanted so long as he didn’t want to use the TV, and he didn’t say a word. I guess he figured if video games were going to turn me into some rot-brained awful person, it would have already happened.