Wii love it

Man, my arms are all sore. From boxing. On a Wii. Our friend left his Wii at our house last week and it's been a nonstop fake sport party ever since. Play golf at 8pm? Sure! Box some weird scraggly guy who looks like The Dude? KO in two rounds. Canoe around a lake while trying to gather special points bubble? Ehh, can't quite do that one yet. But soon. J and I both created miis, so when we play against one another there's an added layer of super competitiveness. It doesn't so much suck to lose as it sucks to watch your pansy mii weep while the other mii does a victory dance. Jerk victory mii.

The fun of playing these games reminds me of when Heather and I holed up for an entire weekend one summer because we'd rented a Nintendo Game Genie from Blockbuster and were putting it to good use. Good use included having infinite lives on Arkanoid so that we could get to the final level that looks like a face and is full of unbreakable gold bricks and also lasers shooting at you. We eventually defeated the game, but it took every bit of that infinite life business, and I don't think you can convince me anyone ever beat that game without the aid of a Game Genie. That weekend we also defeated Super Mario Brothers. Then we drank like three malts apiece and probably never picked up a controller again.

It turns out our nerdiness was only in hibernation, though. As soon as computer games became the new video games, we were on that shit like a thief on a potion. We were mostly engrossed with Quest for Glory series and did pretty well. We had to periodically chase my brother out of the room because he didn't like playing the game so much as buying the hint book, reading it cover to cover, and then trying to tell us all the secrets.

Around this time, we also discovered the internet. And can I just tell you that our favorite pastime was to log into random internet sites, give ourselves screen names that had the words "vampire" or "amazon" or "wench" in the title and try to find "cute guys." Remember this is the dawn of the chat room era and we were, oh, FOURTEEN. Our method for finding "cute guys" was to pick a name that sounded "cute" like, I don't know, Owen or Tyler or whatever name we thought could only belong to the cutest boys ever, and then randomly seeing if they were available to chat. And wouldn't you know it, most of them were! Luckily, my mom, who was in no way more versed in the ways of chat rooms or the possible evils of internet predators, was a good mom and gave us time limits for the computer, keeping us from chatting with Todds all night long. This might also have to do with the fact that we had dial up and were paying by the minute or something.

Once we gave out my phone number and some "cute boys" called us. They wanted to meet up, but my mom said over her dead body would she drive us to meet some internet boys and we were all, "That's so uncool. A mall IS a public place!"

But then we got over it and started going to gothy dance clubs in Boulder with some new friends we met in high school.

I promised J I'd come back upstairs for some Wii bowling. I'm a little nervous that I'll get so good at the video game that I'll be unpleasantly surprised the next time I go to pick up an actual 12 pound ball and try to pitch it down the lane.