A smashing day with the gamers

My left thumb aches right now because I just spent my afternoon in a gamer's paradise, the "Smash for Chile" fundraiser. The event was a way to raise money for Chileans displaced by the February 27 earthquake and to unite about 50 Super Smash Brothers enthusiasts who dream of being the ultimate Smash champion.

You never know what to expect in an event like this, so after I paid my $5 to enter the championship bracket, I slapped on my name tag and walked into a scene more beautiful than I could have imagined. The university of Oregon's Mills International Center is decked out with luxurious couches, which were now filled with eight separate stations of Smash players, all warming up on flatscreen TVs hooked up to N64s. I scanned the room, overwhelmed as I observed eight battles happening at a time...eight splendid screens filled with the magical intensity of old school video game graphics and vibrant color pixels.

It didn't take long for some guys to notice one of the only girls in the room, and they invited me into their battle. "Wow, a girl who plays Smash Brothers?" one of them commented and I became instantly giddy at the thought of annihilating them with my skills, which I had already begun to downplay. But it became obvious to me why these were the only guys with free controllers. They came here expecting to win. They even made an announcement saying that if someone could beat them in a team battle, they would donate an extra $50 to the cause.

They were brothers. Andrew was stocky and cocky. His character of choice was Ness, and his precision with the yoyo was enough to strike fear in the heart of even the most hardcore gamers. His brother, Jonathan wore a black wife beater with a tooth necklace, and his dark, emotionless eyes said he was all business. This was not just a game for him. This was war. He dominated with Pikachu, using the thunderbolt to finish off his opponents as they careened though the air. They had all these inside jokes they kept repeating, like "Meet me at the dock, no weapons!" and "Who's the dead guy who hit me with the salt shaker?" One of them said I was the best girl they ever played, and the other told him to shut up.

After a couple games, someone announced that the tournament would begin after a brief video, and bagel bites were on the way. The video showed the damage in Chile and had a slide at the end that said "Falconnnn thank you!"--a play off Captain Falcon's catchphrase, "Falconnn Punch!" I was one of the only people who laughed. Their tasteless wordplay was not lost on me. Jonathan started massaging his calf muscles--to limber up for battle, I assume.

The rules were one-on-one, five lives, items optional. My first match up was with a cute guy named Adam. We both played Pikachu, and our skill levels were so close that we went life for life until I took him out with an electric grapple. My hands were shaking and I felt bad for him, but I moved up on the bracket. I was hoping the next person would be easier to beat, but I got paired with none other than Andrew, the cocky brother. I could see in his eyes he knew he would beat me. He bashed me mercilessly with Ness's yoyo and used his power boost to knock me off the platform on multiple occasions. He still had four lives when he took the last of mine, but offered me a few conciliatory words: "You actually had me on my toes!" Thanks, Andrew. Thanks a lot. Why couldn't I have gone up against you after I beat a couple more of these guys? We shared a sweaty handshake and I headed for the bagel bites.

The semi-finalists played on a huge projector. It was awesome. Every glorious attack and kill were matched with the shouts of everybody watching. The brothers played each other, and I imagined this rivalry had been going on since the birth of N64. Jonathan's cheeks were totally flushed and at one point he paused the game to scoot his chair farther away from his brother, as if his eventual failure could be attributed to limited breathing room. Andrew took second place to a guy named Josh. He immediately demanded a rematch, which he also lost. You go, Josh.

A guy named Tony who looked and dressed like Michael Cera's character from Arrested Development asked me if I wanted to play with him and a guy who looked like Hagrid. This was much more fun. It was difficult, but I eventually beat them both before Andrew joined our game and proceeded to "teach me" how to be a good team player. Sub sandwiches and Monster energy drinks arrived and before I knew it my blood was surging with artificial adrenaline and Michael Cera started to compliment my skills. 

Despite some sexist comments and my unlucky draw in the bracket, I have to admit, this was also my paradise. I met some truly worthy opponents, witnessed mind blowing KOs and indulged in the best free food any 13-year-old boy could ask for.

We dream of ways to break these iron bars

Last night I dreamed that a colossal earthquake turned everything to sand. Even the walls and floor of our house became sand, and the earth shook all around us. The constant bending and warping of the walls tossed us around, and as we fell back and forth inside what remained of our apartment, it got smaller and smaller, and the sand closed in around us. When I thought we might be completely consumed, the shaking stopped. While everyone sat, relieved, I decided to venture out and assess the damage. A short walk took me to the edge of the dunes, where I looked over the hill to see a dark city intact below. In the background were neon lights, and it was being run like a giant amusement park, with a young man taking tickets at the front.

On that note, this song is epic,
Thrice, The Earth Will Shake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1LR9z-Vm4g

Canary yellow and robin's egg blue.

When I look back on my childhood, I can think of many things I'm thankful for. Ironically, I'm particularly thankful I didn't have many things that most people would value. We always hear money can't buy happiness but deep down, we can all think of a couple things that would make us happy if only we could afford them. Opportunity is probably the closest thing to happiness money can buy. Aside from that, I'd rather hold onto my memories of baking mud pancakes in the sun, turning bedsheets into tents and melting crayons together on our metal slide in Arizona.

I have a recent fascination with reading YouTube comments for my favorite videos, and tonight I indulged in a comment stream for a scene from Garden State. Someone mentioned that aside from Garden State's amazing soundtrack (it changed my life when I was 16), its implied commentary on wealth vs. squalor is its most brilliant quality. I never consciously recognized the movie's contrast between the emptiness of affluence and the satisfaction of a simple life rich in love.

By no means am I saying that a financially secure upbringing means emptiness; on the contrary, it can allow people to focus on deeper levels of fulfillment, beyond physiological and security needs. But without the many hardships of my childhood, I might never have learned to appreciate the small things. I do stop to smell the roses. White roses usually smell amazing. And the scent of fresh dirt always brings me a sense of nostalgia, to those mud pancakes drying on the fence as I leaped through the cool streams of our sprinkler.

One day, whether I live in a crumbling apartment or a sparkling house, I hope instead of staring at the multicolored pixels of a computer screen, my children try to melt their crayon sets into multicolored blobs. Sometimes we learn the most when life is messy.

What the talking animals in "Babe" should have just told us

I never truly considered giving up hamburgers until today, when I heard the most convincing reason yet for vegetarianism. It was actually in an interview with Aaron Weiss, the singer for MewithoutYou, a recent lyrical love of mine.

This realization actually began about a month ago when I watched "Home," that movie about how we have exploited the Earth and destroyed our environment. It should be in the Horror section because of how unsettling it is. This movie, in part, discusses the allocation of feedstocks and creates a disturbing perspective of the amount of crops that are dedicated to feeding livestock so that we Americans can eat meat. To those who haven't done their environmental homework, this information should bring nothing short of a slap in the face, and perhaps even a tear to the eye when you think about the starving masses who aren't even fed as well as the livestock, much less the people who eat the livestock.

I was surprised to feel legitimate guilt about indulging in the occasional 99-cent cheeseburger. I'm not even a big meat eater. I've had many vegetarian friends but people rarely give a strong reason for their dietary habits. Their explanations are usually indecisive comments about health and animal cruelty, at best--not that these aren't valid reasons. They just weren't enough to get me really thinking.

Today's realization was different though. Aaron Weiss touched on a facet of the vegetarian cause that hadn't been presented to me before. The problem with the massive meat harvest isn't just that these cows live in cramped, unsanitary conditions. Give them all five star hotel rooms and we've still got a question of humanity. Animal cruelty, I've come to recognize, is the treatment of animals as commodities. They are no longer living, but existing, completely for the benefit of humans. How can we bring cats and dogs into our homes and treat them like family while we disregard the happiness of other animals? Why do we get to decide which animals deserve good lives? Here, one might say that cows are stupid so it's different. But people with lower IQs deserve the same shot at living life to the fullest, right?

Many people already considered these arguments, I'm sure. Perhaps I've been blind to something obvious to true vegetarians, and now I can silently appreciate when they steer clear of the meat on the menu; but I'm gonna wait to publicly high five them until I've made the decision myself. I can't be sure next time I go to Applebees I won't think about ribs and forget what I've heard, figuring the world is a corrupt, unchangeable place that I might as well enjoy to my own sense of fullness.

Bottom line: The commodification of life is out of control. And commodification should be a word. For how prominent it is, there shouldn't be a red squiggly underneath it. Maybe just a little yellow sad face. :(

The interview with Aaron Weiss: The video quality is pretty bad but it's worth a view. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkQK-8Au894