|
| Thread: Divorce before Rock Band | |
|
violent_flower
Promising
Supreme Hero
Almost there.
|
posted May 27, 2008 10:58 PM |
|
|
Divorce before Rock Band
This is great...................Her husband was in a real band and now they have been married for ten years. He is addicted to video games and her evidentally to reruns of the Chef. The story continues...
"Ten years later, I am slumped at my computer, reading an Internet recap of a 2-year-old episode of "Top Chef" that I have seen six times. I have not put on hard pants -- that is, pants with a zipper or pockets -- for four days. The man I married is on the couch in the living room, his eyes glassy as he diddles the control on the Xbox, blowing to smithereens shadowy figures lurching across the screen. We haven't spoken in several hours.
"Ben?" I say. No answer. "Ben? Ben?" I repeat his name over and over again, with increasing desperation, finally culminating in a single, furious shriek. "BEEEEEENNN!"
We live in a two-room apartment. Next door, the neighbor bangs on the shared kitchen wall, the pounding muffled by drywall. "Quiet!"
Finally, Ben looks up. "Sorry, baby. It's the noise-canceling headphones."
Ah yes, the noise-canceling headphones. You could lock Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly and Mullah Omar in a room together with a stack of Hustlers and 10 ounces of meth, and they couldn't come up with anything more misogynist. I storm back to my desk and type the phrases "my husband" "addicted" "video games" "HELP" into the search engine. Hundreds of links appear.
I click on the first one, a Christian counseling Web site, where a desperate woman named Tiffany, whose husband plays video games nine to 11 hours a day, is reminded by the nonaccredited Christian counselor that man is master of her dominion and tells her to pray to Jesus to restore her husband's love.
This isn't going to work for me. Besides, I have already prayed to the Jewish God for guidance, and the Jewish God, as he has done for millions of Jewish wives since time immemorial, advised me to rip my husband's headphones off his head and scream at him for never putting his leftovers back in the fridge. This tactic proved less effective than I hoped.
I click on another page, where a forum of concerned women instruct me to regain Ben's attention by walking around the house dressed in skimpy outfits and waggling my hips provocatively. One enterprising poster, aptly named Cyberhottie69, even suggests draping one's naked breasts somewhere impossible to miss -- like the coffee table, or on his head, like a doughy, undulating hat.
The angle Ben is sitting at makes this impossible, but I sit beside him on the couch, unzip my hoodie to reveal the lacy top of my bra, and press my breasts firmly against his bicep.
"Baby!" he swats me away. "I'm killing Nazis here! I'm saving our people!" His eyes are alight with righteous anger.
"No, you're not!" I want to scream. "You're not killing anything! You are pointing a piece of plastic at another piece of plastic and pretending something happens! You are not a fearless teenage hero of the Warsaw ghetto uprising! You are a copywriter on the Upper East Side and you are over 30 years old!"
The most depressing thing about getting older isn't really the reminders of inevitable physical decay -- the gray hairs that pop up in unexpected places, the faint lines beginning to etch themselves permanently in the corner of each eye, the mornings when you wake up with a hangover, even though you haven't been drinking -- but the gradual winnowing of options, as your personal limitations become more and more obvious and eventually start beating you about the head and neck with brutal force. The chasm between who you planned to be and who you are grows wider and impossible to traverse.
We try to make ourselves more interesting. We might take up salsa dancing, or become obsessed with cheeses, or begin to wear a fez in public. When this fails, we begin to take out our hostility on the person we feel trapped us in our inescapable little shell of mediocrity.
Whether this hostility is expressed by retreat into a fantasy world in which one is a gun-slinging super-fighter saving the world from totalitarian evil (him) or a plunge into unforeseen depths of pathetic, whining neediness (me), the result is the same. You start to fake-hate each other, and if you're not careful, the fake-hate festers into real hate, and suddenly, ladies at synagogue are clucking their tongues at your mother. "It's such a shame! They seemed like such a nice young couple."
"If you don't stop playing that game right now, I'm filing for divorce!" I holler. He can't hear me. You know, the headphones.
But this was all BRB, Before Rock Band."
they found their love together...In a video game..
____________
Learn how to duck and weave because I will throw truth at you all day!
|
|
friendofgunnar
Honorable
Legendary Hero
able to speed up time
|
|
posted May 27, 2008 11:07 PM |
|
|
Quote:
I click on the first one, a Christian counseling Web site, where a desperate woman named Tiffany, whose husband plays video games nine to 11 hours a day, is reminded by the nonaccredited Christian counselor that man is master of her dominion and tells her to pray to Jesus to restore her husband's love.
heheheheh
heheh
what was the source for this btw?
|
|
violent_flower
Promising
Supreme Hero
Almost there.
|
|
posted May 29, 2008 05:54 PM |
|
|
Oh it was just a yahoo story that I read. I would have to get the link. great story though.
____________
Learn how to duck and weave because I will throw truth at you all day!
|
|
pandora
Honorable
Legendary Hero
The Chosen One
|
|
posted May 29, 2008 06:37 PM |
|
|
I'm getting RockBand for my son's birthday for the PS3 (he better not read this  )
Its good to hear that its the glue that holds family together, so much easier than those conversations over dinner 
____________
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
|
|
violent_flower
Promising
Supreme Hero
Almost there.
|
|
posted May 29, 2008 06:53 PM |
|
|
Well I will tell you my kids love it. No replacing dinner time however but very fun. I thought the story was cute and well writen. May i recoomend downloading songs online as well.
____________
Learn how to duck and weave because I will throw truth at you all day!
|
|
pandora
Honorable
Legendary Hero
The Chosen One
|
|
posted May 29, 2008 07:13 PM |
|
Edited by pandora at 19:14, 29 May 2008.
|
Quote:
No replacing dinner time however but very fun
Oh, so you mean that if I buy the game I still have to feed them too?
Just kidding Once a week they'll still get their bucket of fishheads, I'm a good mommy 
My son is an aspiring drummer, and my daughter wants to be the next Miley Cyrus (hopefully minus the internet photos ) so I think it'll be a good fit for us.
With regards to the actual first post though - I do think its cool the way game developers have been coming up with stuff the whole family can enjoy. For my husband and I, we always play together - like back in the days of HoMM addiction, the only fights we'd have over being online would be about who's turn it was to play... and why did he always play people that took such looooooooong turns
Now with the games on the Wii, we can all play stuff together, so not only do I get to know what my kids are doing - but we can actually do it with them
Our next buy after Rock Band will be Wii Fit, that looks pretty groovy too  I love that they're making games that you actually have to get off the couch to play 
____________
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
|
| |
|
|
