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In Which I am Unreasonably Melancholic
I get nostalgic and even melancholy about the strangest things.
I went downstairs this morning and my parents were using the WiiFit. They made some space in our usually cluttered living room to have people in the house on New Years' Eve. Since there was open floor in the center of the room, my mother (because I'm sure it was her rather than my dad) got the things set up and was weighing she and my dad. (She tried to weigh the dog, too, but he wasn't being cooperative.)
The Wii has a really cute-ified interface. Maybe you know it. Little cartoony character versions of all the people in the house line up on the screen and you pick one to tell it who you are. It even knows Wonka, the dog, is a pet, so it tells him to "ask his owner" to do tasks.
It also says things like "I haven't seen so-and-so for a while," or offers reminders of people's birthdays. This is sometimes problematic for me. Not all the time, but often enough that it keeps me from using the system. How is it problematic?
I can't help but think of the array of little people as a snapshot of the state of my life. This is all my family; the people who share my house with me. People I care about a lot. And someday, I'm going to move away from them. Or one of them will move out. Or something else will happen and one of those people won't be here anymore. But that little cartoon version of them will still be there, treated like family by a game console that wants to know how they're doing and why it doesn't see them much these days.
I get emotional about endings and changes. The dissonance between the inevitable changes in real life situation vs the static nature of the loving sharing of living space that the Wii displays is jarring. It makes me think of how little time, in the end, I will have the opportunity to be with these people that I love before we part to follow our different paths. It's especially hard knowing that it is fairly likely that I will be moving far away in less than a year. It hurts.
Not to mention that, though I assume someone has removed him from the system by now, it reminds me of the Wii asking my parents why it hadn't seen our housemate around a month or two after he was struck by a car and killed. I didn't even experience that myself and it still stabs me in the gut to think about.
And now I find myself missing people in my life who I see every day. Or more accurately, I think about how much I'm going to miss them in the future and it's almost the same thing. It's unpleasant. And it makes me glad I spent a while last night playing a game with some of them.
I went downstairs this morning and my parents were using the WiiFit. They made some space in our usually cluttered living room to have people in the house on New Years' Eve. Since there was open floor in the center of the room, my mother (because I'm sure it was her rather than my dad) got the things set up and was weighing she and my dad. (She tried to weigh the dog, too, but he wasn't being cooperative.)
The Wii has a really cute-ified interface. Maybe you know it. Little cartoony character versions of all the people in the house line up on the screen and you pick one to tell it who you are. It even knows Wonka, the dog, is a pet, so it tells him to "ask his owner" to do tasks.
It also says things like "I haven't seen so-and-so for a while," or offers reminders of people's birthdays. This is sometimes problematic for me. Not all the time, but often enough that it keeps me from using the system. How is it problematic?
I can't help but think of the array of little people as a snapshot of the state of my life. This is all my family; the people who share my house with me. People I care about a lot. And someday, I'm going to move away from them. Or one of them will move out. Or something else will happen and one of those people won't be here anymore. But that little cartoon version of them will still be there, treated like family by a game console that wants to know how they're doing and why it doesn't see them much these days.
I get emotional about endings and changes. The dissonance between the inevitable changes in real life situation vs the static nature of the loving sharing of living space that the Wii displays is jarring. It makes me think of how little time, in the end, I will have the opportunity to be with these people that I love before we part to follow our different paths. It's especially hard knowing that it is fairly likely that I will be moving far away in less than a year. It hurts.
Not to mention that, though I assume someone has removed him from the system by now, it reminds me of the Wii asking my parents why it hadn't seen our housemate around a month or two after he was struck by a car and killed. I didn't even experience that myself and it still stabs me in the gut to think about.
And now I find myself missing people in my life who I see every day. Or more accurately, I think about how much I'm going to miss them in the future and it's almost the same thing. It's unpleasant. And it makes me glad I spent a while last night playing a game with some of them.