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Friday, October 1, 2004

Otherwise You'd Never Leave The House.

I've been obsessed with balls lately.

My latest obsession—in fact, one that has rolled The Boyfriend up in it as well— is a strange Japanese game called Katamari Damacy that was just released here in North America. Your task is to take a small sticky ball and roll up anything in the world smaller than you into a larger ball. That's it. Yes, the metaphoric possibilities are endless, it's true, as are the dirty jokes. I can highly recommend the game...It's wonderfully strange and utterly absorbing.

Unfortunately, "absorbing" is what the game has done with all of my spare time, too.

OK, not entirely true. There's Pokémon, too. Which is no less escapist, and balls figure prominently in that world too. I bought into the hype of the new releases and am coming out again as an Adult Player of Pokémon. Or trying to, anyway. In my fantasy world, I meet great friends just by pulling out my Gameboy and chatting with them on BART. In reality my commute is so short, I hardly have time to play...and given that the typical fan base of the series is aged 9–13, few would really have much to say to me, even if they were commuting downtown to the Financial District during rush hour. Recently on a gaming Website someone sent me a message telling me how excited they were to meet another "Trainer" who was even older than they were! I was so flattered, as you might imagine. In fact, I was planning meet up with some more players this evening, but I think I suddenly came down with a bad case of Too Old.

But it hasn't been all video games. I've ventured out into the Big Blue Room, been very social, went to the Folsom Street Fair (more on that to come, I promise) plus we've seen a performance or two...in fact, there hasn't been a night this week that we didn't have something scheduled. Which on the one hand is good and exciting and makes me feel full of life. On the other hand, it...cuts into my sticky ball time. (Told you it was an obsession.)

So somehow through all of this, without much sleep, I managed to do well on my big project here at work--where our corporate logo is, you guessed it, a great big ball. I can't get away from it! I think this weekend, however, the flat truth is that we're going to have start working on these four square walls -- especially if we ever intend to have people over for a housewarming party.

Which means, as much as we may not want to, we'll have to stop playing with our balls. No, I mean the sticky ones. No, I mean...oh, never mind.

06:40 PM PST (link)