Alone time....

The second to last thing you want to say is that you are surprised at how much your married life has come to resemble your parent's. But given the banality of that statement, the absolute last thing you want to say is that you never thought you would be saying that your married life resembles your parents. These are the structures of language and experience that make life earn the adjective ‘crushing’. Tonight, crushed by the work week, she watches TV and I sit at the computer, playing Halo.

I might write a book about Halo. For now I’ll just go through the basics and repeat a funny anecdote about cultures coming together.

Halo is a game where you are like a robocop killing aliens. It’s a first person shooter, which mean, as the literary minded might be able to guess, is that your vision is that of the charater you play. You don’t look down above from them, which would of course be 3rd person, but look out through their eyes. And the ‘shooter’ part refers to the gun. Everybody is kind of done killing aliens, having won the game several times, so they gather instead on the online multiplayer where, instead of a chat room, people gather in a valley called blood gulch to kill each other. A game can hold up to 16 people divided into two teams, and capture the flag is one of the most popular games.

There are tanks and jeeps and appropriately purple alien flying machines that the Italian players seem to favor, which actually makes me uncomfortable. Anyway Halo’s popularity peaked around 2003 I guess, so now there are just a few steady games going on. And for some reason there are a lot of Latin Americans online playing, mostly it seems, from Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico.

I can verify this because when a game ends there appears a statistics screen reviewing the numbers killed and all that, and during this time there is a chat option where players debate if they will play again on the same map or move to a new one, if they will use Rocket Launchers or Sniper Rifles. Yesterday during this down time some Mexicans were conversing on the chat and the host was taking a long time to restart the game. One guy, named Blade, kept retyping AGAIN AGAIN, from which point I will recreate the conversation

MexForca100: Buen juego todos!
Blade: again
MexForca100: Ale, si quieres mandarme un email…
AlejandraXX: Si, pasame tu direccion
Blade: AGAIN
MexForca100: Es es mexforca en hotmail, si tienes una pregunta..
Blade: AGAIN ESTUPIDO
MexForca100: Tu tambien hablas Español?
Blade: NO ESTUPIDO