Out of Practice

My vacation from work last week wasn't supposed to be a vacation from writing. I didn't leave the NYC metropolitan area and had plenty of time to write blog entries and other things that might be read by other people someday, but I spent most of my time doing no such thing. I think I completed one blog entry during the entire week, and that was in a blog that was originally supposed to be updated daily. That lasted for three days, and now once a week seems like a much more reasonable goal.

The weather was great for most of last week, but I didn't play any competitive basketball because my shoelaces are a wreck. It's like they are living beings with the life span of a hamster but this time the hamster has some bizarre genetic ailment causing one side of its body to become inexplicably twisted and then it was treated by a stumped vet that managed to make the problem worse and now my left shoe features a knot leading to a lace-goatee leading to a relatively normal looking lace that sticks out much too far and half the lace on the other side is still twisted and if I play any sort of sport someone will probably step on my laces causing me to trip and fall and hurt my knee even worse than I did last night playing video games.

When one thinks of video-game related injuries, which is itself probably a sign of playing too many video games, the knee is not likely to be in the first five injury-prone areas considered. The wrist (obvious) eyes (staring at the screen too long), back (terrible posture sitting in the chair), elbow (Wii sports), and fingers (same reason as wrist) are all more likely and the same can probably be said for other body parts. But I managed to hurt my knee. I am currently re-playing Twilight Princess and this time I would like to finish it by myself and in less than the 88 or so hours that it took the first time. One of the things that I couldn't do myself last year when I first played the game was fishing. Fishing in that game requires a lot of patiently waiting for a fish to go on the hook and then swinging one of the controllers around your arm to simulate reeling in a fish. After ten minutes of not doing anything productive yesterday basically sitting and slightly moving the Wii Remote, the game told me that I caught a fish so I reeled it in without causing myself much pain. Unfortunately for my knee, the game requires the player to catch two fish consecutively, so I repeated the process and...actually I think that was harmless too and I lost control and hit myself with the "nunchuk" later. But I'm ok now.

If you rank things by how much time I spent on them over the past week and a half, which is probably more problematic than pondering video-game related injuries, then playing Zelda would not be ranked very highly at all. I spent more time sleeping, eating, at improv shows, at open mics, on the subway to get to those places, writing emails, checking baseball stats, talking about baseball stats, watching baseball games, reading, playing poker in Harlem...and the list goes on but probably not for all that much longer. If you want to know what I think I wasted the most time on over the break, my answer would be Facebook's poker tournament. They give you a thousand chips of fake money and then the goal is to try to get a lot more chips without running out. I managed to end up with about 60,000 at the end of the week after spending ridiculous amounts of time (about 20 hours total I think) playing that game in my room. If I took ten real dollars and turned it into sixty times that it would sadly be an amazingly great week of work, but internet gaming laws and my current financial situation make it virtually impossible for me to try that so I just won 75,000 facebook poker points which have the approximate monetary value of my left shoelace (my right shoelace is worth considerably more). Maybe the upcoming tax rebate will allow me to try to make some extra money (right now poker is probably a better investment than the stock market) but I doubt it. Finishing in the top 500 out of 400,000 should be worth something besides facebook points but unfortunately it is not.

Hopefully the time that I spent writing about my relatively wasted vacation will get me more in a writing mood so that I would go over a week without writing in this blog again and I'll write more for my other blogs too. I feel like it's been ages since I wrote a sonnet.