When life gives you chickens, make chicken soup

I've come to terms with the perception, nay, fact, that I am nerdy (thank you Michael Ng, whoever you are, for confirming this; and thank you Rachel, for telling me that Michael Ng--whoever he is--thinks that I'm a nerd), and I suppose I'll openly acknowledge it. My idea of a good Friday night is not going out partying, or getting drunk, but thank goodness I'm not alone. Of course, nor does my idea of a good night involve staying in and playing video games all night. After watching an episode or two of Alias, I continued my reading for the day. It's not so much that David Sedaris' adventures are edge-of-your-seat exciting... it occurred to me just now that his writing reads more like a blog. In fact, I was in the middle of reading Chicken in the Henhouse, a story which, to my limited understanding, deals with his guilt-like discomfort at being alone with a 10 year old boy for fear of looking like some serial rapist when I realized that maybe the reason that we hang on to his every word is that we're a little voyeuristic ourselves. At that point, I felt a little guilty, as if I had been caught leering at someone in the distance. My head turned up to look around, as if to check if anyone had caught me in the act, only to see Bryan behind me playing Pacman, and when I was satisfied that no one gave a crap what I was reading, I promptly closed the book and hid it underneath yesterday's newspaper. Maybe I'll just give video games another try.

B: "It (PacMan) is not just a game."
Me: "It's a way of life?"

And then, I proceeded to think... what if pacman was some profound allegory to life? We're all little yellow blobs, yearning for sustenance in the form of little golden nuggets? Nuggets? Maybe they're not nuggets, maybe they're pills, each one lending us some temporary satisfaction (like sugar pills or... speedballs), or some way to stave off hunger, or some motivation to keep trekking (Diminishing Marginal Utility doesn't seem to exist... holy crap). Anyhoo, those little colored creatures coming after you represent the demons in our lives. Red-- which represents blood, like diseases attacking our body. Blue-- like the ocean, forces of nature can strike at any moment. Purple-- a color that brought on a witch hunt in the late 90's, and represents society's faults and fears. And orange-- orange is for ax murderers. We can never permanently overcome these demons, but we can temporarily chase them away. The levels go on and on, and never seem to cease. Once you hit the umpth level, you begin to wonder to what end you're working for. Will your existence have been for nought after the game is over? Or is meaning found in the journey toward reaching that umpth level? Time to find another game, one with that will not require soul-searching. Minesweeper is starting to sound like a better option.