Christmas Eve Morning Reflection

It's been almost a week since I started replaying LUNAR: Silver Start Story Complete, and I'm almost done with the game having reached the third act. Once I get to the end, I'll have gained one lost saved game and can move on to the next one. That is provided time is with me.

I never realized how much of a vice video games can be for some people.

Myself, I just like to play every so often the role of someone different than who I really am. An artist with magical powers, a young cadet fresh out of the military school that ends up saving the world, a boy from the middle of no where that ends up becoming a great hero. That's the only reason I ever play video games.

Now, it would seem the real reason I play is because of the item collecting and need to open up all the secrets. Collecting all the character pictures scattered throughout the game, finding (and keeping) the best sword in the game, locating the hidden items that you can use when you replay the game over. All of these I've done just so I can look at my games and say to myself I actually finished 100% of the game.

It's a wonder how I made it through high school with an Honors Dilpoma while still playing video games and doing nothing else outside of homework.

Recently, however, my main vice hasn't been as strong as my loyalty to my friends, what few I have left. Every night I sign on and wait for them to do the same. I don't care what our conversation is as long as we have one. I've screwed up several times, most of them recorded here. Yet I consider myself lucky that I am still able to have some kind of contact with them. They'll never know how much they mean to me, and I doubt they will ever know how it feels to know that their friendship and love can overpower the one thing that has grabbed my attention this week. At least, until a certain future President reads this and gives them a verbal tongue lashing for not signing in and talking to me some nights that not even Jerry Springer would be prepared for. (Okay, that was my moment of greed. I'm sorry.)

Later tonight, my family will be doing Room at the Inn. It's a seasonal church event, for lack of a better word, in which a van of homeless people are picked up and dropped off at the church to eat good food, sleep, wash up, and generally get out of the cold. Tonight is going to be full, hopefully. The weather as of my typing is about 16^oF, and is forecasted to not go above 25 all day from what I saw. Definitely not good weather to be out in. I can feel it in my room because of the lack of insulation and the fact that I live above the garage, but even I get a little bit of heat. Anyone living on the street in this kind of cold doesn't unless they sleep over a vented storm drain like the one on the side walk on 7th Ave. next to the downtown Ramada (or whatever the name is of that fancy hotel).

That's all I can type for now. I need some of my dad's chili to warm me up before I go back to my room to finish off Ghaleon for kidnapping the girl that I loved since childhood (basic plot of LUNAR). That chili of his can melt steel!