Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.
Nostalgic Vicery
Stumbled upon something in the archive that I wrote three-four years ago for a gaming site to earn journalist credit for an E3 pass. My travel arrangements fell through, so I wasn't able to go to the convention, but I kind of like this piece. Not enough that it wasn't very difficult to resist the urge to edit...but still.
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Two months ago, I had a dream that I was sitting, smoking on the jungle gym in the yard of the elementary school I attended a lifetime ago. I don't smoke, well, I didn't at the time, I think the smoking was simply my recent viewing of The Royal Tenenbaums mucking around in my pre-sleep memories.
Margot Tenenbaum appealed to me as few characters are able to do. That it's Gwyneth Paltrow on screen doesn't hurt, but it's more the depiction of stunted emotional growth in full force that really touched me. Popular culture is saturated with stories of the gifted child forced to grow up and excel, despite feelings of extreme isolation. However, once these children prove how amazingly they can overcome whatever obstacles are intended to drive the plot forward, they continue to grow and mature, and find their respective happy endings.
Margot never grew up. The image of a young girl taking up the very adult, very stupid habit of smoking to me represents this forced maturity. It is tragically adorable to a kindred spirit to see the ways a talented child deals with these complex emotions. Seeing that girl still childishly hiding this habit from friends and family twenty-two years later, still, in fact, wearing the same girlish skirts, hits very close to home for a newly minted "adult" who also vainly holds on to the vices of his childhood.
And so I find myself this morning, and most other mornings, atop the jungle gym. It was on a whim at first that I left home thirty minutes early, bought my first pack of cigarettes, and set out to re-enact this dream that I was caught up on. I found this place not surrounded the forest I remember, but a denser forest of pre-fabricated housing. Whim quickly flowed into fascination at the changes the playground saw while I should have been changing as well. I like to think that it is this fascination, rather than any physical addiction to my new clandestine habit, that has brought me thirty minutes out of my way every morning. Everything that was once wooden is now rendered in brightly colored plastics shapes. The teeter-totters and merry-go-rounds were missing in action, likely victims of over-zealous parenting. The only familiar object in the yard was the jungle gym. Though, looking at my perch similarly reminds me of the ravages of time, what once looked so much like a magic carpet now calls up trigonometry.
The shapes may have changed, but looking around I can see that the general form has remained the same. In the far corner, I see the spot where I sat with my friends and remember when we finally figured out that "Aziza" was the answer to the Enchantress' final riddle. Seeing the swings through the smoke produced as I take a drag brings back being blown away by the ending of Ender's Game for the first time, just before the bell rang. And the ensuing cough brings back the physical sensation of the seemingly impossible task of inflating the gigantic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blimp I brought for show and tell.
This flood of memories laps over consciousness, and I recall all the times technology passed me by. Nintendo became Super Nintendo and then Nintendo 64. Cassette tapes became CDs. Computers could talk and play games with each other. Books were ordered into chapters, and soon became thick, thousand page novels. I learned how to pinch every penny of allowance and lunch money in order to keep up with the steady pace of progress.
Keeping up is a rather sobering thought. Though I used to glaze over the pain in order to look back fondly on the giants of my childhood, now, sitting and smoking, I see Margot Tenenbaum smoking beside me in her bathtub. Video games and books were tools to escape the harsh reality of the other loud, mean children I couldn't understand. I took comfort in my isolated superiority through the shower of grown-up smiles at the big words and concepts I gleaned from their popular culture. I subsisted almost entirely on the admiration of teachers and parents alike, and I drove myself to learn and acquire in order to impress. Gaming was then both relaxation and socialization, the only bridging interest among my few friends.
As years passed and I grew and found myself, gaming was no longer a necessity. I now had real friends, I had involved myself in hours of service groups, stage productions, and part-time jobs. What had once been associated with a need for companionship and activity had been replaced. However, the obsession with books and games remained, associated now with the relief and joy they once provided in a much more practical sense.
And now I'm on the verge of becoming the adult I so admired as a child. Moving into my first apartment, half-way through my college education, and recently legally of-age, I have all of the components of adulthood under my belt. And yet, gaming remains a giant albatross around my neck. I have great difficulty finding my identity as a modern, twenty-first century adult when I would much rather stay up for an all-night dungeon crawl than complete the work required for passing my biology lab. When notes from my Japanese class are illustrated with Ninja Turtles and Sludge Vohaul. When time and time again I fail to meet expectations because I willingly distract myself. Sharing a cigarette in secret with Margot, I see that I too have failed to grow past the level of maturity with which I felt comfortable. Nostalgia has become a vice, a distraction from the responsibilities of adulthood only a child could envy.
And yet, as I stabbed out my cigarette this morning, awash in a sea of unpleasantly colored pre-formed plastic and pre-fabricated metal, I decided that distraction is better by far than delusion. I am comforted by the fact that though I am no longer a teenager, I still remember how to disappear into fantasy. Though I often look back on the way things were, I am still enraptured by the way things will be.
I don't want to be a kid again, but I don't want to lose the drive and obsessive love I've known all along. There is some unidentifiable balance, something ambiguous thing that I want to be.
And I realize, sitting in the trough of a very large sine wave, that will have to suffice as my identity as a young adult for this morning, as I'm now exceptionally late for work.
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