Correction: Life is Good

It appears I have been greatly misled by my dad, who misunderstood a remark Grandpa made. What Grandpa said was that he might do Crowduck with just him and Grandma next year. What Dad failed to understand was that he meant a second trip: Everyone would go, and then maybe just Grandma and Grandpa would go a month or two later. So, Crowduck is on, and it was never off in the first place!
-I found out this much when I went to Oxford a couple days ago for Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa. I actually went on Christmas Eve and slept over. Uncle Joe was there, as he is every year, flying out from Oregon. Aunt Irene was also there; she (as I understand it) had come in to help Grandma and Grandpa around the house while and after Grandma was in the hospital with some sort of problem. Grandma is still a bit tender. I played a lot of pool with Uncle Joe, and, thanks to a quantity of beer, I actually gained a winning record (4-3) over him: unheard of! Christmas came. I had some stuff toward the stranger end of the spectrum this year, namely, from Grandma and Grandpa, a flashlight that you put on an elastic band over your head. However, in trying to think what possible use I could have for such a gift, I realized that it would make the perfect "headlight" for my biking forays in the dark. I also got a Swiss Army knife from Uncle Dan. And from Mom and Dad, I got The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, an exhaustive tool caddy (Mom got it wholesale from her job at The Hillman Group), a book called In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, and one other thing that I do not immediately recall. Oh yes, it was this year's 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar. This year, the Grasshoppers passed to Uncle Dave. These things have been circulating in the family for about forty years. It's a little tin of Dutch Boy brand Fried Grasshoppers. Every year, the recipient gives them to someone else. I recall that when I gave them, I boxed them in a gradually enlarging series of boxes. I like to have a little fun.
-So now to get to the real meat of this post. I try to come up with at least thing to write about that, rather than just current events, is an opinion or something. Today I ask: What good are RPGs? Not Rocket-Propelled Grenades. I mean Role-Playing Games. My most immediate beef is with one that Micah plays. It's called RuneScape. I was surprised to learn that something called runes actually plays an important part in the game; I had figured, when he started playing, that they had found the word "rune" somewhere and decided it made a neat euphonious name for the game. Increasingly it's become clear to me, though, that whatever they're calling runes aren't really runes. I think a more accurate word would be "scrolls". That's not my point. My point is that RPGs are really an insidious thing. For one thing, they're not really games. A real game has a goal. The goal in RuneScape, as far as I can tell, is to "level up". Micah currently has about five characters, and the highest is at Level 59. The point of getting a higher Level is to be more powerful, I guess. There is no endpoint to the game, nothing you have to achieve other than stare at a computer screen and navigate a bad-graphics character (whose face you never really even get to see) around a bad-graphics medieval "world". The "world" resembles the constructs of a world you find in your dreams, where everything is scaled down except you, and you don't have a lot of motor control over yourself. I saw Micah's character wander across a "mountain range" whose tallest mountain was about fifty feet high and which was about an eighth of a mile long, but which was nevertheless covered in snow and inhabited by white wolves. It was enclosed by wooden fences at the borders of the property of a few farmers. Everything about the game is surreal. For example, unless you're in, as I gather, "The Wilderness", your character can walk right through any other character wandering around. The cities are guarded by large amounts of "guards", but what these guards are good for is anybody's guess, because not only do they just pointlessly wander (not guarding anything), but you can easily kill them and nobody even looks twice - not even the other guards. Once you've killed one, he instantaneously decomposes and youpick up his bones for some reason and bury them wherever you feel like: say, in a paved street, or in the floor of the Bank. That, as far as I can tell, is about all there is to the game. Amble aimlessly, kill guards and stuff, level up. And doing this, Micah spends at least three hours a day and usually more. (When I ask him how much RuneScape he's played in a day, he usually claims about two hours, but clocks hailing from the Real World beg to differ.) A game that has no explicitly stated goal. Seems to me a lot like this one thing I've heard of called "living". A game that simulates life! How grand! Well, the thing is, even if it were a good simulation, and it definitely isn't, it isn't life. All it is is a simulation. Our subject has transferred his time from the real world to this surreal 640×800 one. And he's so caught up in the excitement of having something to do there (level up) that he doesn't realize that the game is draining away his life. He feels successful, too, because he can quantify his results. "I leveled up! Now I'm at level 60!" Well, that's not success. It's nothing.
-This goes for every other RPG, too, because obviously they're all nothing.

Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!

I've ascended from a dive into the depths of a murky pond, and I'm now decompressing. I'm finally done with my college applications; I basically finished on the 13th. It's the first thing everyone asks me, so here is where I applied to: Miami, OU, Grinnell, Kenyon, and Carleton. Everyone says, "Why OU? It's just a party school." Well, for one, it's a safety, though I probably don't need one of those with my handsome record. For two, it has the prestigious E. W. Scripps School of Journalism, which could come in handy.
-Since coming up to the surface, I've finally had time for stuff that isn't colleges. The first fun thing I did was whittle a pawn. I've decided I'm going to whittle a whole chess set. This pawn might not be part of it, because I'm not sure that I like pine, which is what I carved it out of. I have a stick of holly, which feels like it should be good carving. I also have some oak, but that's most probably too hard.
-If I haven't mentioned, I've gotten pretty into chess. It's not like an all-consuming obsession, but I do tend to be very diligent in doing the things I like to do. Look at font designing, for example. I do it a lot. If not for hobbies, what would we fill our lives with? That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I play with Keith at lunch every day. We sit outside of the lunchroom on a concrete picnic table, even when it's cold (though we haven't had to worry much about that yet, about which more presently). Currently my record against him is 24-0-6 (6 draws). Keith and I went to Borders yesterday, because on Fridays, chess enthusiasts - and for some of them, "enthusiast" is clearly not a strong enough word, nor would "maniac" even possibly be - aggregate there and play each other. I beat Keith twice first, just to warm up. A guy stopped by our table, and Keith asked if he'd like to play me. He was about fifty or sixty, and looked like Dr White, or, if you're not currently attending Finneytown, imagine a slim version of the Gorton's fisherman. I played him twice, once as white and once as black. He beat me and made it look really easy. It was a little jarring to be on the other side of that for the first time in a while. I walked right into a knight fork with my rook and king, and I also gave him a pawn fork with my bishop and knight in both games. The second game was closer than the first, but not very much. He also beat Keith a couple times, just for fun. His name turned out to be Andy. After a while, a second guy came by. If you walked by him in any other context, you would never ever mark him as a chess player. He's a lean black guy who probably more than anything else looks like a hobo. I never did catch his name, but until I do I'm calling him Burma Jones, for which reference you should read the super and very funny book A Confederacy of Dunces. I came closer with him. I actually pulled off a couple nice moves, though he beat me in the end in both games. The second was no good, because I accidentally pulled off two illegal moves: moved my knight back two-over two, and somehow got both my bishops on white squares. Pretty embarrassing.
-I'm getting really frustrated with Cincinnati. Since I first decided that I like winter quite a bit, I've been paying attention to the kind of winters we've been having. Two years ago it was pretty good, but then last year's sucked almightily. I won't get into too many specifics, but I vividly remember sitting outside on a balmy day in January or February and seeing a fly calmly land on our bench outside. I figured this year we would surely be compensated, but thus far it's turning out even worse. We've had a total of two days this December below freezing, I believe, and about a half an inch of snow. There's not even going to be snow for Christmas. The typical day, has been about 50 or 60 degrees and quite often raining. Keith remarked as we were going home from Borders how much snow we would have if the temperature were below freezing. I told him we might as well say the same thing in Florida during hurricane season. Doesn't matter how much we could get if it were cold, only matters that it isn't cold and thus we're getting none, because Cincinnati is a tepid toilet bowl. Dad says it's going to end up being a really terrific winter, as soon as the weather takes a sudden turn toward the severe. He says last winter nothing happened because it just gracefully went from warm to coolish to warm, but this year we've got tension going on and that's what makes big weather. Well, we'll see, but ain't nothing going to assuage how much I hate having a green Christmas. (Chant: MinnesotaMinnesotaMinnesota)
-Today we went to, what is it, Dayton or Centerville? I can never remember which it is that Aunt Tami and Uncle Mike live in. Well, we went there and did Christmas. Nana and Papaw were there, and so were Travis and Jackie, and later, Uncle Jeff, Aunt Tanya (embarrassingly, I probably misspelled that), and my cousins Kyle, Katie, and Erica, and Erica's kids Emma (3) and Will (30 mo.), and Katie's boyfriend whose name I've already somehow managed to forget. Joshua? I think it was a J. We don't see this last bunch that often. In fact, I don't think I'd seen Erica for about ten years or something, and I don't believe I'd ever met Emma and Will. What are they? - they're my cousins once removed. I thought it was more exciting than that. I thought they made me an uncle or something. I think I should get at least some special term when I gain a generation under me. Well, in any case, they're cute kids. For Christmas I got some peanut butter fudge, a Borders gift card, and two Engrish shirts 1, 2. Also Micah and I got a communal sledding-type inner tube, which hopefully I'll be able to USE this year.
-That's about all I'm going to write for now. Because I now have free time, after the holidays I'm finally going to get around to writing about Crowduck. I understand that we may not be going this year. Hah! Not likely. I'm going to Crowduck, if I have to bike.

Quick note

Just a quick post to tell you that I won't really be writing a post this weekend (chew on that paradox). Instead I'm finishing definitively my college stuff. I just did an essay about why Carleton and I go together well. It had a 2000-character limit. My essay, through no planning of my own, ended up at exactly 2000 characters. (Unfortunately, to achieve that, I ended up getting rid of the postscript at the end that said, "P.S. I also can't get enough of that Minnesota accent.") Look for me next weekend. As the Beatles said, "I'll be 'round." Those crazy circular Brits.
P.S. I hate my life: I just found out that the 2000-character limit was for Kenyon, and Carleton's was 400.